The Incheon Metropolitan Government held its first fiscal strategy meeting since the launch of the Park Chan-dae administration to discuss the direction of its budget planning for fiscal 2027. The meeting diagnosed the recurring structure of fiscal deficits and shared the outcome of each department and bureau streamlining its own projects to cut a total of 378 billion won.
 [코리안투데이] Incheon City’s 2026 Fiscal Strategy Meeting © 장형임 기자 |
The Incheon Metropolitan Government (Mayor Park Chan-dae) held the ‘2026 Fiscal Strategy Meeting’ in the main conference room of City Hall on September 21. Introduced for the first time since the launch of the Park Chan-dae administration, it was the very first fiscal strategy meeting in Incheon’s history, with all senior officials at the director-general level and above attending to discuss the direction of the fiscal 2027 budget and the key investment plans of each department and bureau.
Going beyond a simple allocation of the budget, the meeting was arranged as an occasion for officials to share the city’s fiscal circumstances and jointly review spending priorities. From a citizen’s perspective, it amounted to laying out the groundwork of fiscal management, offering a sense of where limited tax revenue is spent and on what standards.
The meeting introduced the main recommendations of the Fiscal and Budget Reform Task Force, formed this past July. The task force diagnosed that local tax revenues such as acquisition tax and grant tax are heavily swayed by economic fluctuations, and that the burden of matching local funds to the central government’s aggressive fiscal investment has been compounding, resulting in a structure in which fiscal deficits recur every year.
With increases in welfare spending expected to be unavoidable going forward, the task force recommended, as basic directions and action tasks for fiscal management, managing the appropriate rate of increase in the social welfare budget, imposing aggregate control over existing cash-support programs, and sustaining infrastructure investment to expand industry and jobs.
In line with these recommendations, Incheon City piloted a ceiling-limit system for discretionary projects this year. A total limit of 1.42 trillion won was allocated in consideration of the scale of each department and bureau’s discretionary projects, and each department and bureau reviewed the feasibility of execution and policy priorities on its own to streamline and rationalize non-urgent projects. As a result, each department and bureau cut a total of 378 billion won on its own from the project budgets it had originally requested, and the outcome was shared at this meeting. What sets it apart is that, rather than a superior department uniformly slashing the figures, each department weeded out its own projects.
Incheon City plans to expand the scope of the ceiling-limit system in phases for sustainable and responsible fiscal management. Beginning next year, it will hold a fiscal strategy meeting ahead of the budget-planning process to review the direction of strategic resource allocation in advance, and it plans to establish this as a fiscal management framework for carrying out the Park Chan-dae administration’s major key pledges without setbacks.
Mayor Park Chan-dae stressed that ‘Incheon’s finances are in a very grave situation both internally and externally,’ and that ‘the key to a solution is to properly manage spending within the resources at hand.’ He added, ‘I will do my utmost to repay citizens with the sustainable municipal government I promised them.’
지역 홍보대사 신청 기자양성과정 신청 코리안투데이 지부장 신청 코리안투데이 인천강화코리안브랜드대상 신청 최고경영인대상 신청 소비자만족도대상 신청
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