Winner takes all? Factors shaping unequal selection in South Korea's urban regeneration projects

Urban regeneration grant programs aim to mitigate urban decline and promote balanced regional development. Competition-based grants often favor cities with stronger administrative capacity, robust fiscal conditions, or political alignment, thereby disadvantaging smaller or declining municipalities. This study empirically examines the factors influencing project selection in South Korea's Urban Regeneration New Deal initiative, analyzing 199 municipalities that received at least one project between 2017 and 2022. We employ a Zero-Truncated Negative Binomial (ZTNB) model suitable for count data without zero observations. The results show that urban decline indicators exert mixed effects rather than uniformly increasing the likelihood of selection. Statutory decline indicators are positively associated with project awards, whereas anticipatory decline indicators are negatively associated, suggesting that forward-looking risks are underweighted in current evaluation practices. City size and institutional capacity also play significant roles. Compared with large cities, mid-sized and small cities receive fewer projects, reflecting structural disadvantages linked to weaker administrative and financial capacity. In contrast, municipalities operating regeneration support centers secure more awards, highlighting the importance of institutional infrastructure in competitive grant systems. Taken together, these findings indicate capacity-linked allocation bias in the current grant regime and point to the need for refining evaluation criteria, expanding professional support mechanisms, and institutionalizing need-weighted allocation rules to promote more equitable and balanced regional development. • Urban regeneration projects favor regions with stronger administrative capacity. • Economically active or non-declining areas are more likely to win project selection. • Projects are less likely to be selected in areas with severe urban decline. • Selection imbalance raises concerns on equity in national balanced development.