Ticket levy

A charge on the price of admission, collected at the box office and hypothecated, meaning legally directed to one purpose rather than dropped into general revenue. Korea’s ran at 3 percent of the ticket price and was collected through 2014.

Three things make it the clearest single policy design in this level. It is self-funding, so it does not compete each year with every other line in a national budget. It moves in the right direction, because a bigger box office produces a bigger development budget rather than a smaller one. And Korea’s version carried an exemption clause that rewarded the behaviour the policy wanted: theatres programming animation, short films and recognised artistic films on at least sixty percent of days paid nothing. The incentive was built as a discount rather than a penalty.

Two details usually dropped. The Korean levy was finite, running only through 2014, so it was a front-loaded capitalisation rather than a permanent tax. And it is not the same instrument as a parafiscal levy, which charges the trade on its net income rather than the audience on its ticket, and which Colombia uses instead.

Source: The Korean Film Council’s own introduction page, free at https://www.koreanfilm.or.kr/mobile/other/intro.jsp , states the fund’s size and composition, including the 3 percent box office levy collected through 2014. The exemption clause is recorded in Jimmyn Parc, A Retrospective on the Korean Film Policies: Return of the Jedi, European Parliament, free PDF, footnote 8. Both are collected in section 1.5, Instrument G of the Hope cases research map, which calls the levy “the clearest single policy ask in the whole file.”

First used in: 4.2 · How Korea’s cinema actually got built