SEJONG, July 15 (Yonhap) -- At least one out of three regional infrastructure-related promises made by the incumbent government has been found to be "infeasible" due to a lack of profitability and economic benefits, a report showed Monday.
The Park Geun-hye government, which took office in February, made 27 social overhead capital (SOC) promises to regional governments, including construction of bridges, roads and railways.
The state-run Korea Development Institute (KDI) has so far completed its preliminary feasibility study on 10 promises and nine of them have been found infeasible in terms of profitability and economic benefits, the think tank said.
The government is required to conduct the feasibility study on state-led projects whose business costs exceed 50 billion won and for which it has to provide more than 30 billion won worth of financial support.
A main feasibility index is the benefit-cost (B-C) ratio, which refers to how much benefit can be achieved based on money being injected.
The ratio should be over 1 in order for a project to be economically feasible. The KDI report showed that the average B-C ratio of the 10 SOC promises involving 12 individual construction projects stood at 0.66.
The results come after the government earlier said that it will "in principle" deliver on all of its regional campaign promises but seek consultations with regional governments for projects that prove to lack business feasibility.