President Lee Jae-myung presided over the first plenary meeting of the Regulatory Rationalization Committee at Cheong Wa Dae on the 15th. At the meeting, Yoon Chang-ryul, Minister of the Office for Government Policy Coordination, reported a plan to push mega special zones in support of the "five poles and three special provinces" framework. The fields covered are four: robotics, renewable energy, biotechnology and AI self-driving cars. The idea is to create areas where regulatory, fiscal, financial and tax exemptions are layered together at the wide-area level.
The "five poles and three special provinces" refers to five super-wide-area regions, the Seoul metropolitan area, the southeastern region, the Daegu-Gyeongbuk region, the central region and the Honam region, along with three special self-governing provinces, Jeju, Gangwon and Jeonbuk. It means bundling policy at the level of living zones and industrial zones rather than a single city or county. Robotics falls to the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy, renewable energy to the Ministry of Climate, Energy and Environment, biotechnology to the Ministry of Health and Welfare, and AI self-driving cars to the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport. The fact that jurisdiction is split by ministry comes up again later.
President Lee said regulations in advanced technology and industry need to shift to a negative system. That is a system that lists only prohibited items and permits everything else. With technologies like self-driving software, whose form changes every few months, the existing approach of writing out a list of permitted items in advance has often slowed down development itself. The president pointed to concentration in the Seoul metropolitan area as a problem and called for creating large deregulated areas at the regional level, and he also put measures favoring provincial regions in finance, such as lower loan interest rates, on the table for review.
The support measures were presented somewhat differently by each ministry. Kim Jung-kwan, Minister of Trade, Industry and Energy, announced a package covering seven areas: finance, funding, taxation, talent, infrastructure, technology start-ups and institutions. It includes creating a special growth engine subsidy, fostering nine regional strategic industry colleges and convergence research institutes centered on flagship national universities, and training more than 1,500 people a year in field-tailored programs. Jeon Eun-soo, spokesperson for Cheong Wa Dae, explained that within the zones, environmental impact assessments and permit procedures would be cut to within 60 days, and that additional benefits for companies and employees relocating to the zones are under review.
Administrative procedures are also being reworked. The plan is to reduce the documents that must be submitted to administrative agencies when applying for permits, approvals, licenses and patents, but the scale of the reduction has not come out in a fixed form. A policy of reorganizing some 80 small-scale special zones scattered across more than 2,400 locations nationwide into large-scale special zones was also reported. The approach is to merge them into larger blocks and concentrate support rather than maintaining many small zones.
From a technology standpoint, the usefulness of this design is clear. Self-driving cars need to run across an entire city for data to accumulate, and robots only show their real performance when they move across a full logistics network. For renewable energy, project timelines shorten when generation facilities, transmission networks and permits all operate within the same jurisdiction. The idea of bundling at the wide-area level matches how these three fields actually work.
The hurdles are just as large. How long the exemptions will be maintained and under what conditions they will be extended, and what threshold a technology must clear after pilot testing to move to nationwide commercialization, have not been settled. If these provisions are left blank, the zones can easily become spaces where companies simply repeat trials and then leave.
The meeting also produced a proposal to introduce a "czar system" overseeing the development process, and the president expressed willingness to use it while also stressing regulations to prevent abuse along with democratic control. With four fields scattered across four ministries, who directs what and how far will be a core issue in the design.
The government has set a timeline of enacting a "Mega Special Zone Special Act" through consultations with the National Assembly within this year and beginning the designation process. Minister Yoon said that, playing on the U.S. Trump administration's "MAGA," Korea should choose "Mega." The announcement came 49 days before the June 3 local elections. At the meeting, recommendations for improvement were also raised on driving regulations in school zones and the ban on introducing early-pregnancy abortion medication, and Vice Chair Park Yong-jin noted that seven years have passed since the Constitutional Court's ruling of non-conformity with the constitution on the abortion law.
If the system works properly, daily life changes for people living in provincial cities. Delivery robots pass through alleys at dawn, hospital shuttles circle set routes without drivers, and rooftop solar installations get permits in a few weeks that used to take months. Whether that change ends at the pilot stage or spreads across the full radius of daily life depends on a few lines of provisions to be written into the special act. The outlines of the bill will emerge in the second half of the year, when National Assembly discussions begin.
