Korean Journal of Policy Studies

Graduate School of Public Administration, Seoul National University

Korean J. Policy Stud. 2019; 34(3):1-24

pISSN: 1225-5017, eISSN: 2765-2807

Article

Government Relocation and Public Officials’ Compassion: The Case of Sejong City

Hoyong Jung¹

¹Hoyong Jung is an assistant professor in the Department of Economics at Chonnam National University, Gwangju, South Korea. E-mail: ghdydwjd1@gmail.com.

Â© Copyright 2019 Graduate School of Public Administration, Seoul National University. This is an Open-Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Received: Sep 05, 2019; Revised: Sep 19, 2019; Revised: Dec 31, 2019; Accepted: Dec 31, 2019

Published Online: Dec 31, 2019

Abstract

The Korean central government complex was relocated from Seoul, its capital city, to the newly constructed Sejong City in phases from 2012 to 2014. This study examines how the government relocation affects public officials’ compassion. Applying a two-way fixed effect estimation to mitigate endogeneity, I find that public officials’ sympathy declined significantly after the relocation and that certain management practices, such as a performance-related reward system, have exacerbated these negative effects. As a sympathetic attitude is a significant aspect of public service motivation and it positively related to government productivity, this study maintains that it is necessary for management to take heed of the disadvantageous effects of government relocation and attempt to address them.

Keywords: government relocation; Sejong City; compassion; government management; pseudopanel analysis; two-way fixed effect estimation