Due to the imbalanced land development during last few decades, depressed regions still remains underdeveloped till nowadays. Korean government has carried out various programs for land development. However, these programs are executed by different departments of each Ministry so that the programs are often similar to each other or actually overlapped. Moreover, some more problems are pointed out such as Top-Down structure, diversified investment of budget, hardware focused investment.

Based on these criticisms, twelve programs are examined in this research paper, which are all supported by Balanced National Development Special Account. The budget of all the twelve programs for year 2008 is 1.15thrillion won contributing 18thrillion won for the total expenses. This paper begins pointing out the problems of the development projects of depressed regions. First, the programs, in both terms of contents and subjects, are similar or overlapped to each other. In other words, in lot of regions, similar programs have been simultaneously carried out. This is because of the lack of cooperation among Ministries or even among departments within a Ministry. This not only lowers efficiency of programs but also causes imbalance among regions.

Second, the programs are not working under a structural control as local governments take over the programs from the central government. The driving system tends to limit autonomy of local governments by delivering detailed guide and regulations from central government. Uniform standards for evaluation and the lack of reflux system are also pointed out as problems in evaluation system.

Third, in terms of budget, the financial autonomy of local governments is limited because it is difficult to invest heavily on one program due to dispersion of national subsidy. Moreover, the discrimination in Subsidy Ratio among local communities should be adjusted.

Fourth, most of programs focus on hardware such as dwelling environment improving and expansion of Social Overhead Capital. However, these programs did not help boost local economy by failing creating new jobs.

In the latter part of this paper, alternatives for these problems are addressed. First of all, it is necessary to establish local definition and policy definition. In other words, local definition for depressed region is needed and based on the definition, development policies for depressed region should be established.

Second, overall adjustment for all those programs is required. There are two different methods. First, for comprehensive development system, depressed regions should be classified by farming, fishing and mountain villages and allotted to departments in charge. For the second method, programs should be merged based on their function. Then central ministry introduces comprehensive program categories and local governments make their own decision on details. Program merging seems desirable since the first method is not able to offer fundamental solution. But it should be considered in a long term as it requires critical preconditions that local governments should strengthen their capabilities and the programs should be merged. Considering these context, a transitional period is needed.