매장문화재 발굴을 위한 효율적 규제체계 : 실험적 실증검토를 중심으로

Although a variety of regulations are imposed for effectively excavating buried cultural heritage, these regulations to promote public interest, nevertheless, tend to restrict the use of private property. The mandatory excavation regulation is not an exception as it forces landowners to excavate buried relics without damage upon discovering them, thus restricting the landowners’ expected use of their lands via a prompt development. It is in this sense natural to predict that landowners would have incentives to avoid this regulatory duty. This paper starts from a basic law and economics proposition that regulatory compliance may be promoted by including a combination of other supplementary instruments such as an ex-ante survey requirement and a compensation mechanism for landowners. We constructed a dataset consisting of the actual excavation projects, for each of which we were able to determine, as of 2017, whether an ex-ante survey had been conducted beforehand. We also collected a subsample that includes information regarding the amount of compensation provided by the government. We then empirically confirmed that ex-ante survey requirements significantly helped discover cultural heritage and that compensation also played a fairly productive role. While these empirical investigations are not full-fledged due mainly to a preliminary nature of the data, the results strongly imply a possibility of improving the current regulatory system through a more adequate combination of different policy instruments.