旅游景点门票上涨的地方政府激励

Fiscal Condition,Official Tenure and Governmental Incentive Modes: Analysis of the Price of Scenic Spots

财政和人事制度是影响地方政府激励模式的两个关键因素。财政状况决定了地方政府积累政绩的资源约束,任期长度影响到政府对不同政绩的偏好。地方政府激励模式决定了他们对手中垄断性资源的利用方式,而这会反映到政府对景点门票管制的态度。本文利用4A级以上景点门票价格数据,实证分析了景点门票背后的政府激励因素。实证结果揭示,政府官员变动越频繁,财政状况越差,与旅游关联的产业对政府收入重要性越小,景点门票价格会越高。

In this paper, we discuss the mechanism and determinants of pricing of scenic spots＇ entrance tickets in China. Since 2000, the management authority of scenic spots is decentralized from central government to local governments. Together with the public holiday arrangement in 1999, especially ＂Golden week＂ arrangement, the demand of Chinese people for leisure and traveling increases very rapidly. Scenic spots turn to be a very lucrative re- source for local governments. The prices of entrance tickets increase greatly in many places, however, some local governments choose different strategies, for instance, Hangzhou government cancelled most of entrance tickets of the parks around Westlake. They announced to establish a free park for everyone. Hence, it is of great interests for us to ask, why local governments choose different strategies, what the determinants of scenic spot pricing are, and how to rationalize the behavior and the incentive of local governments. Local governments have their own incentive and restraints. In the literature on Chinese local governments, fis- cal arrangement and personnel institution are deemed as the two most important determinants of incentive model of local governments. Since the tax reform in the 1990s, the total fiscal income is more and more centralized to upper level governments, especially the central government, and at the same time, lower level governments bear more and more burdens of public good provisions, hence local governments have great incentive to collect possible extra- budgetary income. Beside the fiscal budget pressure due to the duty of public goods, career promotion is also the important incentive to local officials. In the official personnel arrangement, if an official loses initial promotion con- test, he will face more and more severe obstacles in his occupational advancement. Therefore, in the environment of high official turnover, local officials put higher weight on short-term administrative performances, which aggravate the short-term fiscal pressure to accumulate their performances. Therefore public resources are often utilized in a shortsighted way, even they can be utilized more efficiently in the long run. Beyond the above mechanisms, there are other possible relationships between the ticket price and the incentive mechanism of local governments. Due to complementarities between tourism and other industries, such as catering, entertainment, commerce, and other service industries, the level of ticket prices can affect the development of com- plementary industries. In pursuing the total fiscal income, local officials face the tradeoff between the direct income of entrance tickets and the indirect fiscal revenue from these related industries. From the viewpoint of public choice, public policy can be seemed as the platform that different interest groups exert their influence, bargain with each other, and determine the benefit allocation according to their influence power. The income ratio of complementary industries to tourism can reflect the relative influence power of interest groups of these industries. So the relative im- portance of tourism complementary industries can affect the price of scenic spot tickets. We use the data of China＇s above 4 star scenic spots to verify the above mechanism of incentive and restraints of local governments in public resource utilization. Through the transform from individual ticket price to representa- tive city-level ticket price, we can empirically analyze the determinants of ticket price and connect them with the incentive mechanism of local governments. We construct the measure of fiscal pressure by the fiscal deficit index, the measure of time vision of local officials by the official turnover, the measures of relative importance of tourism complementary industries by two indexes reflecting the different extent of the relative fiscal income dominance of these industries, and control other possible affecting factors, like GDP per capital, population, economic structure, city administrative level, number of scenic spots, and empirically test the related hypotheses. Our regression results show that the more frequency of local official change, the more fiscal pressure, the less dominance of supplementary industry related to tourism industry, then the higher level of ticket prices. As a whole, the empirical results support the hypotheses ＇of incentive mechanism of public resource utilization for local governments. And there are some poli- cy implications about the way of overcoming the ticket-dependent mode of tourism, which include strengthening to fiscal capacity of local governments, encouraging the development of complementary industries to tourism, and cul- tivating the long-term vision of administrative oerformance for local officials.