转移支付与政府扩张:基于“价格效应”的研究

The Transfer Payment and the Government Expansion: A Study Based on “the Price Effect”

分税制改革以来，金额巨大的财政转移支付是否是地方政府支出规模持续扩张的重要推手，国内研究对此缺乏深入的理论分析。国外经典文献提出了“财政幻觉”等4种假说，来解释转移支付对政府规模的影响，但这些理论解释是否适用于中国，有待检验。通过引入“价格效应”——转移支付导致公共服务的价格下降，本文从微观视角揭示了一般性转移支付产生“粘蝇纸效应”的独特机制，即“价格效应”是转移支付促使地方政府支出较快增长的关键因素，这印证了税收成本假说。基于2000～2007年中国县级层面数据的实证分析以及多个维度的稳健性检验，证实了上述发现。本文的研究结论为我国建设地方税系和完善转移支付制度，提供了政策启示。

After the tax-sharing reform, the domestic studies lack profound theoretic analysis of whether the huge amount of the financial transfer payment(FTP) is an important driving measure for the sustained expansion of the scale of the expenditure of the local government. The foreign classic literature has put forward 4 kinds of hypotheses such as'the financial illusion'and etc, to explain the impact of the FTP on the government scale; but whether these explanations are adaptive in China should be tested. By means of the introduction of'the price effect', i.e., the FTP leads to a decrease in the price of the public service, we have, in this paper, from the micro-perspective, disclosed the special mechanism in which the general FTP produces the flypaper effect, that is to say,'the price effect'is the key factor of the FTP promoting the relative increase in the expenditure of the local government, which testifies the hypothesis about the tax cost. Based on a case study on China's county-level data between 2000 and 2007 and based on the multiple dimensions of robustness tests, we have confirmed the above-mentioned discovery. The conclusion of this paper has provided policy enlightenment for China constructing the system of the local tax and for perfecting the system of the transfer payment.