专项转移支付与地方财政支出行为——以农村义务教育补助为例

Earmarked Grants and Local Government Spending Behavior——Evidence from China's Rural Compulsory Education Aid Program

如何设计专项转移支付制度才能有效引导和矫正地方财政支出行为?本文研究发现,专项转移支付的政策效果取决于转移支付分配规则("扶弱"还是"奖优")以及经济发展的阶段。随着经济发展,嵌入某种激励机制的"奖优"规则比事后"扶弱"规则更能引导地方政府合理安排公共支出。进而,本文以2006年全面展开的农村义务教育经费保障机制改革为背景,利用2007年中部五省423县的数据,运用非递归结构方程方法进行了实证检验。结果表明,义务教育专项补助制度设计中较好地嵌入了"奖优"机制,实现了激励地方政府将资源向基础教育倾斜的目标。这一发现对当前构建兼顾公平和效率的专项转移支付制度具有参考价值。

This paper argues that the effectiveness of earmarked grants depends on the rules to distribute grants, assisting the weak or rewarding the good, and the stage of economic development. As economy grows, the rule of rewarding the good will be superior to the rule of assisting weak, which will result in more balanced public expenditure structure. Taking the rural compulsory education expenditure guarantee mechanism reform in 2006 as background, we test the interrelationship between earmarked education grant and local education expenditure using nonrecursive structural equation models with a sample of 423 counties in central China. The evidence indicates prevalence of the rule of rewarding the good, which leads to more local spending on education. This finding is of importance to build an equitable and efficient earmarked grants system.