支出竞争理论:来自公共预算和政治经济学的共同关注

The Theory of Budgetary Competition:Studies from both Public Budgeting and Political Economics

在有限资源的条件下,竞争是公共预算过程的基本特征之一,处理竞争更是预算政治中的关键主题,但预算过程与财政支出过程中的"竞争"本身却长期被研究者们所忽视。公共预算领域和政治经济学领域分别对支出竞争进行了一些理论分析和实证研究,但他们的研究过于集中在西方国家的国防与社会福利支出关系之上,对其他支出间竞争关系以及对中国预算竞争的研究非常少。而且,各领域的支出竞争研究成果之间缺少必要的交流和沟通,以至于至今没有形成一套完整的"支出竞争理论"体系。所以,从支出竞争研究本身的重要性以及该理论当前所遭遇的尴尬处境出发,对支出竞争的描述性和解释性理论构建,以及对中国支出竞争事实的定量分析都有待进一步加强。

As there is always more demand for public spending than there is money,competition turns out to be one of the basic features of budgeting.All budgets contain tradeoffs,holding competition is one key theme in the politics of expenditures.However,budgetary competition and expenditure tradeoffs seem to have long been ignored.Scholars in the field of both public budgeting and political economics have carried out some theoretical analyses and empirical studies separately on expenditure tradeoffs,but too much attention has been paid to the so called 'guns vs.butter' debates of developed countries.Conflicts between other spending and especially expenditure tradeoffs in China and other developing countries are surprisingly under-researched.Another serious problem is the lack of communication or mutual promotion of findings of different research fields,which in turn makes the construction of a systematic 'spending/budgetary competition theory' still up in the air.Facing the importance of,and the problems with,expenditure competition research,more contributions should be made to the construction of a mature theory system for both expenditure competition description and explanation,as well as to the quantitative analysis of the intense and various expenditure competitions situated in China.