공기업 부채관리에 효과적인 회계정보의 속성에 관한 연구 : 공기업 경영평가의 계량지표를 중심으로

Public Corporations (PCs) not only have a mission to maximize the profitability but fulfill public responsibilities by supporting the government’s policies. The current government has emphasized both job creation and investment expansion as a method of jolting the economy out of recession since COVID-19 began in early 2020. As such, the government has monitored and boosted PCs’ investment. The government policy, however, had a side effect of the profitability deterioration of PCs. For example, while net income of market-type 16 PCs and quasi-market-type 20 PCs was 9 trillion Won in total in 2016, but the profit had decreased over time and reached to 0.6 trillion Won net loss and a half of PCs suffered from loss in 2020. It is also expected that profitability deterioration of PCs negatively influence government’s financial stability because PCs are established and operated by government’s control and PCs’ debts are guaranteed to get paid by government. In other words, increased PCs’ debts are de facto “shadow” debts of the government. The government has recognized the importance of debt management in PCs and adopted various policies to control their debt level. For example, the deputy prime minister for economic affairs announced “Normalization measures regarding PCs’ debt” in 2013. The target of the measures was to decrease debt ratio from 220% in 2013 to 200% in 2017 by setting three principles―(1) PCs voluntarily suggest their plan how to manage their debt, (2) the government prepare policies to support the PCs’ plan, and (3) the PCs’ plan should be monitored by the performance evaluation on PCs annually. We examine whether the performance measures in annual PC performance evaluation system effectively control the PCs’ debt management. Specifically, this paper aims to investigate (1) whether the current performance measures on debt management is effective and (2) which is the better proxy for debt management between operating income (OI) and operating cash flow (OCF). While OI measure captures operating performance using accrual based accounting, OCF is the amount of cash generated by a company’s normal business operations. Using the financial statements of 10 market-type PCs from 2008 to 2019, we find that (1) the current performance measures on debt management effectively reflect the objectives of PCs’ debt management, and (2) accrual based OI is negatively related to short-term leverage ratio, while OCF decreases mid/long-term debts and leverage ratio. These results imply that both OI and OCF should be used in debt management of PCs in a balanced way and the debt management strategy should consider that a policy or an economic event can have different speed of the impact on financial status. Moreover, more performance measures that base on OCF should be developed to ensure efficient debt management. The findings in this paper are expected to contribute to the efficacy of PCs’ debt management and provide practical policy implications.