Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

‘No one left behind’ is one of the core messages that the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) agendas contain and declare. South Korea has been well evaluated regarding its Civil Registration and Vital Statistics (CRVS) system and National Health Insurance (NHI) policy, since these national-scale welfare policies and systems have remarkably contributed to ensure ‘universal coverage’ of citizens.

However, international actors and civil societies have raised an issue that the serious blind spot still exists outside South Korea’s national universal coverage system. For instance, subject of duty who is responsible for a child’s birth registration is limited to his or her parents. This makes the children of the most vulnerable group including immigrants who are legally restricted in terms of birth registration and single moms who are reluctant to register their own child’s birth to be located outside of social security system. Thus, the most recent discussion about Universal Birth Registration (UBR) is mainly focused on plans and measures to alleviate such marginalization of the system.

This research intends to implement comparative analysis on the past and present of South Korea’s universal coverage policy governance in a macro perspective. Specifically, existing policy governance structure of NHI, CRVS, and UBR system will be stereotyped and analyzed respectively in more detail. Then, the impact of solidified governance structure towards the current policy network of UBR system and challenges will be identified. Overall, this research is qualitative research based on various secondary sources and data including government reports, news reports, congress documents, and so forth.

Throughout the research, results are expected as follows: First, each system has different governance type and thus stereotyped according to it; CRVS as ‘sub-government type’ that has the most exclusive network, NHI as ‘policy community type’ in which limited scope of stakeholders face head-on confrontation, and UBR as ‘issue network type’ that is the most horizontal type. Second, CRVS and NHI system have limitations on their coverage, which only includes ‘legally invulnerable nationals’ due to its comparatively exclusive governance type. Such limitation also has a negative influence on ongoing discussion process about expanding the scope of beneficiaries to the children of socially and legally precarious status groups. The fundamental difference between existing universal coverage paradigm, which only considers the equity ‘within the system,’ and the most recent one, which focuses on the equity ‘within and without the system,’ came to be the most serious challenge to diverse policy stakeholders in ‘issue network type.’

In sum, to achieve UBR, there should be continuous discussions to overcome limited universality of existing governance and to make progress on counting everyone as a whole. Although there have been some changes in governance according to the transition of environments in global and national contexts, policy would not be compensated without examining the impacts of existing policy that had been implemented in closed and limited way. The case of South Korea can provide a policy implication regarding the core factors that should be considered to realize global agenda through policy in a nation-state dimension.