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The Era of the Data-Driven Public Administration Act: Strategies for Using Fiscal Data

(Purpose) In 2020, South Korea amended its ‘Three Acts on Data’ and introduced the ‘Data-Driven Public Administration Act.’ In short, the age of data-driven public administration seeks to realize data-based intelligent government. This appears fascinating at first sight. However, if you take a detailed look at the acts, there’s a great deal of ambiguity. The laws only serve to regulate and fail to provide any details. Although the context differs from the previous ‘Public Data Act,’ the lack of a data utilization strategy means that the laws are more of a proclamatory manifesto featuring a big picture. (Design/approach) The biggest limitation is that the laws fail to distinguish between conventional administration data and fiscal data, and there is also a collision, if not an overlap, between the roles and functions of committees created by the existing laws (e.g., Public Data Strategy Committee). Laws do not function in real life just because they are enacted. There must be a concurrent data utilization strategy. In the case of the US, to elaborate evidence-based policymaking, the ‘Foundation of Evidence Policy-making Act’ is nested in the same frame with the Federal Data Strategy. In the case of the UK, data utilization strategies are being pursued based on ADR UK. Korea has made vast amounts of data publicly available, but in the absence of a strategy (i.e., detailed roadmap), it is failing to consider data utilization. There are challenges to the inter-operability of publicly available data and the potential for mismatch, even in the basic temporal dimension, setting aside the issue of the right format. (Research implications) Significant funding has been committed to ‘The Year 2021 Korean New-Deal Budget,’ which includes a Data New Deal. To complete this task, a data utilization strategy that remains at the level of a manifesto won’t be enough. Various government agencies - including the Ministry of Economy and Finance, the Ministry of Interior and Safety, and the Ministry of Science and ICT - must come together to re-establish data utilization strategy. This is the right moment to systematically build a strategy that befits the era of data-driven public administration.