财政分权与政府承诺力:基于信息传递的视角

Fiscal Decentralization and Government Commitment:From the Perspective of Information Transmission

财政分权是指中央政府与地方政府在财政收入和支出方面的权责划分,中央政府将部分财政决策权交由地方政府,允许地方政府在一定程度上决定其税收收入和财政支出。与中央政府相比,地方政府更加了解当地居民和企业的真实信息,因此地方政府拥有一定的信息优势,能更有效地制定财政支出计划并进行资源配置。本文采用委托代理的方法来分析财政分权是如何使得中央政府有效利用地方政府的信息,我们首先基于信息传递的视角来构建不同财政体制下的单期理论模型,包括中央政府集权、廉价磋商和财政分权。在单期模型的基础上,本文重点研究了两期模型下的最优财政支出决策权的下放问题。两期模型的复杂之处在于我们考虑中央政府在不同承诺能力下的最优机制,即中央政府有完全的承诺能力、有限的承诺能力和没有任何承诺能力的情况,并重点探讨在有限承诺能力下中央政府的最优机制设计问题。

Fiscal decentralization refers to the division of labor and cooperation between the central government and local governments in fiscal revenue and expenditure.The central government has delegated some fiscal decision-making power to local governments,allowing it to make some independent decisions on their tax revenues and fiscal expenditures.Compared with the central government,local governments have a better understanding of local residents'preferences and utility and other information,so local governments have certain information advantages and can more effectively formulate fiscal expenditure plans and allocate resources.In this paper,we use the principal-agent approach to analyze how fiscal decentralization enables the central government to make effective use of local government information.Based on the perspective of information transmission,we construct a theoretical model of fiscal system,including centralization of central government,cheap talk and fiscal decentralization.Based on the single-period model,this paper focuses on the decentralization of optimal financial expenditure decision-making power under the two-period model.The complexity of the two-phase model is that we consider the optimal mechanism of the central government under different commitment capacities,which are cases under which the central government has full commitment capacity,limited commitment capacity,and no commitment capacity.