ScholarWorks@중앙대학교

초록

This study examines how provincial capital relocation affects in-migration at the county/city (si-gun) level, focusing on widening intra-provincial disparities. While Korea’s balanced development debate has long centered on the capital region versus non-capital regions, recent demographic decline and slower growth have shifted attention to the redistribution of population and functions within provinces—namely, whether growth in newly developed hubs spreads to surrounding areas or remains concentrated. Using panel data for 17 local governments in Chungcheongnam-do and Gyeongsangbuk-do from 2006 to 2023, we classify areas into the relocation core (Core), surrounding functional areas (Near), and a baseline group (Base). We estimate benchmark OLS models and difference-in-differences (DID) models, including a multi-group DID that simultaneously identifies effects for the core and near groups. The results show a robust and statistically significant increase in in-migration to the relocation core after the policy, whereas no clear post-relocation change is detected in the surrounding functional areas on average. A coefficient-difference test further indicates that the core effect is significantly larger than the surrounding-area effect, suggesting that the migration impact of provincial capital relocation is more likely to be concentrated in the core rather than broadly diffused across the functional region. These findings imply that evaluating relocation policies solely by visible growth in the core may overlook uneven outcomes within provinces, and that policy assessments should explicitly consider functional-area dynamics and intra-provincial distributional consequences.

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