财政依赖度与政策执行:关于省内教育公平的实证研究

Fiscal Dependency and Policy Implementation:An Empirical Study on the Intra-Provincial Inequality of Financing Basic Education

实证研究表明,分税制改革在整体上显著地提高了省对中央的财政依赖度,进而提高了省内基础教育的均衡度,有效地促进了教育公平。这说明,在一定的条件下中央政府可以通过改变中央与地方财政关系来部分地达成自己的政策目标(缩小省内教育不均衡)。不过,从微观看,财政依赖度与省内教育均衡度之间的U型曲线关系表明,虽然分税制显著地改变了每个省对中央财政的依赖度,但这并不能直接地促进一个省的教育均衡。在相对贫困的省份,高财政依赖度会负面影响教育均衡,而富裕省份的情况则正好相反,其主要原因在于绩效评估制度和2006年前的重点学校制度。因此,单纯中央财政能力的提升并不能确保中央的政策(如教育均衡化的政策)可以在地方获得更多的遵从。

The study is designed to explore the influence of the 1994 tax reform on the intra - provincial inequality of basic education. The empirical analysis finds that the reform decreases the inequality in general, implying that the central government could attain its policy goal through centralizing its relative fiscal capability and increasing the inter-governmental transfers. The data defy that there is a linear relationship between the fiscal dependency of province on the central government and the educational inequality, even though the reform has changed the fiscal dependency of each province significantly. But the study strongly supports that there is a U-shape relationship between the fiscal dependency and the inequality. This indicates that when the fiscal dependency increases, the education in a richer province will be more equalized while that in a poorer province will be more in inequality.