腐败、公共支出效率与长期经济增长

Corruption, Public Expenditure Efficiency and Economic Growth

本文从理论和实证两方面考察腐败、公共支出效率与长期经济增长的关系。本文在传统研究公共支出的内生经济增长模型中引入腐败要素,并建立一个包含家庭、厂商和政府的一般均衡模型。模型均衡解由参数校准的方法模拟计算得到。研究发现,公共支出效率与经济增长显正向关系,而腐败通过影响公共支出效率间接作用于经济增长。进一步地,本文运用中国30个省1998—2008年间的数据,同时采用多种静态和动态面板数据模型,实证检验了以上理论假说。结果表明,公共支出效率的提高有利于经济长期增长,而腐败的发生降低了公共支出效率的正向效应。这意味着尽管腐败对中国经济增长的作用尚存在多方面不明晰的途径,但其通过影响公共支出效率从而负向作用于经济增长则是显著的。

This paper investigates the relationship between corruption, public expenditure efficiency and economic growth in China, both theoretically and empirically. Within the traditional endogenous growth model of public expenditure, we first establish a general equilibrium model, where corruption is introduced to the model through its impact on effective public expenditure. The model is solved numerically using parameters from the actual practice of Chinese economy. The results imply that public expenditure efficiency positively affects economic growth, while corruption indirectly affects economic growth through its impacts on public expenditure efficiency. Using provincial data from 1998 to 2008 in China, our empirical study, based on various static and dynamic panel data models, provides strong evidence for the theoretical implication. All these findings point to a fact that although the detailed mechanisms through which the corruption affects economic growth have not been explored explicitly in China, corruption may have negatively affected economic growth in China by reducing public expenditure efficiency.