Korea’s welfare system in its current form is largely a product of developments since the 1990s. The system is supported by the Korean government’s digital infrastructure, one of the most advanced of its kind in the world. Nonetheless, gaps in welfare provision continue to surface, presenting themselves as a perennial problem. Following the 2014 ‘mother-and-two-daughters’ incident in Songpa, Seoul, increases were mandated in welfare expenditures and programs aimed at removing these gaps. Similar incidents continued into 2025, particularly in areas of society that institutional attention fails to reach. These tragic incidents, it has been argued, reveal the limitations of the existing welfare paradigm, in which benefit payments are conditioned on beneficiaries filing an application. There is, of course, a contrasting view that the source of the problem lies not so much in the application-based approach as in how welfare benefits are delivered and in what amounts. From this perspective, identifying previously excluded cases would not make a substantial difference if welfare resources continue to be delivered in an ineffective manner. It is time that we give serious consideration to this issue and seek alternative policy measures. In this connection, the President’s 2025 directive to consider the future of the application-based approach has set a new policy direction. The focus of this month’s Health and Welfare Forum is “The Application-Based Approach: Its Meaning and Strategies for Loosening Its Grip in Welfare Administration.” The contributors explore the theoretical and legal issues concerning the application-based approach and ex officio action in the area of welfare administration and discuss relevant cases from selected countries, including France’s Solidarity at Source, a new benefit payment approach linked to administrative data sources. The contributed articles compile findings from four in-house seminars conducted by a group of KIHASA researchers over a period of just 70 days. They may in part overlap with or run contrary to one another. The idea, after all, is rather to synthesize varying perspectives and diverse information about the current state of the issue at hand than to reach a single, agreed-upon conclusion. We hope the material presented here will serve as a useful reference in the effort to expand welfare policies that put human dignity and rights first, certainly above administrative convenience.

Inasmuch as Korea’s public assistance system has been criticized for conditioning benefits on formal application, this article inductively reconstructs the meaning of the “application-based” approach―a welfare-administrative principle without a clearly established lexical definition―by analyzing the vicissitudes of related laws, comparable approaches, and high-profile media coverage of poverty-related deaths. The advantage of the application-based approach is that it functions as an entitlement mechanism that limits administrative discretion and obligates the state to provide benefits. However, the corollary disadvantage is that it combines with selection procedures to produce gaps in welfare provision. Analysis of newspaper reports on four recent deaths, each related to the requirement that public assistance be formally applied for, suggests that non-application results not so much from lack of information as from a complex mixture of structural factors. While noting the limitations of the view that attributes gaps in welfare provision primarily to the rule that procedures for determining eligibility begin only after an application is filed, this article argues that the government should aim for a rights-based society that acts unreservedly upon citizens’ legally entitled claims for support, rather than a proactive state that comes of its own accord to citizens’ assistance.

This article surveys research cases on the “application-based” approach in welfare administration in selected countries―the UK, Japan, Germany, and Sweden―and analyzes how this doctrine is defined in legal terms and practiced in policy implementation. The studies surveyed indicate that the application-based approach places a significant administrative burden on applicants, including psychological costs related to information acquisition and compliance requirements, and propose automation through data technologies and proactive information provision as possible improvements. Germany combines the application-based approach with ex officio administrative action in areas such as industrial accident insurance, whereas welfare programs in the UK are strictly application-based. In Japan, the principle has been criticized as acting as a barrier to accessing social assistance. Sweden’s automated decision-making system represents a notable attempt to mitigate, through digitalization and linked data, the difficulties arising from application-based welfare administration. Overall, these case studies suggest that mitigating the drawbacks of application-based systems may require a flexible mix of ex officio measures, digital technologies, and proactive administrative outreach to identify need.

In March 2025, France rolled out reforms that expanded the automated processing of benefit applications and payments nationwide for both Active Solidarity Income (Revenu Solidarit？ Active) and the In-Work Allowance (prime d’activit？). This shift aimed to address several issues arising from the complex structure of the French social security system, such as the non-take-up of benefits, administrative errors, and improper payments. At the core of the reform is the initiative known as Solidarity at Source (solidarit？ ？ la source), a new system that automatically pre-fills income declarations through data linkage, thereby reducing reporting errors and administrative friction. This article explores France’s introduction of Solidarity at Source and discusses the remaining challenges and their policy implications.

The issue of moving away from conditioning welfare benefits on formal application can be discussed from a perspective that moves beyond the either-or dichotomy of “the application-based approach vs. automation.” This article takes the view that the transition away from the application-based principle can occur in degrees, as depicted by four scenarios stemming from a two-by-two matrix with a target-group axis (all citizens vs. welfare information subscribers) and a payment-method axis (automatic notification vs. automatic payment). Hence the four models: (1) automatic notification for welfare information subscribers; (2) automatic payment for welfare information subscribers; (3) automatic notification for all citizens; and (4) automatic payment for all citizens. The first scenario, the least progressive, most closely resembles the current system. As each successive scenario is assumed to be more progressive, the fourth is expected to be the least stigmatizing and most effective in reducing gaps in welfare provision. However, it may also be more vulnerable to concerns about self-determination, privacy, and the claw-back of erroneous payments. It may be relatively easier to automate universal benefits and merit goods, but public assistance, being selective and strictly means-tested, requires carefully designed improvement strategies.

Introduced in 2014 and―after successive increases in benefit levels―now firmly established as a quasi-universal program, the Basic Pension suffers from administrative inefficiencies arising from its application-based approach and other complex eligibility criteria. The non-take-up of the Basic Pension, insofar as the problem stems simply from a lack of information or from conflicts with other benefit programs, is attributable less to individual choices and more to deep-seated issues that concern the public old-age income security system itself. Experiences from Western countries show that universal benefits do not necessarily involve automatic payment and that benefits supplemental to earnings-related pensions do not always require individuals to apply first. Future efforts to improve the Basic Pension, particularly regarding the application-based approach, should focus on making its workings rational by removing unnecessary complexity, with a medium-to-long-term goal of enhancing the coherency of the old-age income security system as a whole.

Motivated by the recognition that cases of exclusion from welfare benefits often stem from the practice of the application-based approach, this article explores how the problem of non-take-up could be lessened by a data-assisted approach. The purpose of this approach, which consists in linking to administrative data while still maintaining the requirement that applications be submitted first, is not to function as an initial interventional step but to identify support needs in advance by capturing changes in status, thereby reducing the administrative burden on applicants and lowering barriers to welfare access. However, given the limitations of the administrative data as it stands, a comprehensive shift toward capturing every situation of sudden crisis affecting individuals and all instances of private transfers may not be entirely feasible. This article therefore proposes applying automation first to universal benefits, such as the Child Allowance, that are not or only minimally means-tested, and subsequently in a stepwise manner, and along with systemic simplification, to the rest of the public assistance system.

Welfare administration needs a shift away from the application-based approach toward automated benefits. An administrative principle requiring citizens themselves to file applications for welfare benefits and services has merits of its own, but it is worth considering an approach by which the state could, through automation, minimize or eliminate the application process, thereby improving citizen convenience. Rather than conditioning its obligation to guarantee social rights on individuals submitting applications, the state could take a more proactive role, identifying those in need and automatically providing them benefits and services. The focus of welfare automation, while placed thus far on enhancing administrative efficiency, should now shift toward ensuring protection for those in poverty who are left unsupported. This shift requires concrete planning as to what aspects of the current welfare administration system should be amended―and specifically how―and what should be done in preparation. Any reform will face numerous challenges, as it has in the past. What matters, rather, is how to implement change with minimal trial and error.