地方财政杠杆的激励机制、增长绩效与调整取向研究

Research on the Incentive,Growth Performance and Adjustment Orientation of Local Fiscal Leverage

本文运用空间滞后Tobit和非线性动态门槛等前沿计量模型,从时、空两个维度重新审视了地方财政杠杆的激励机制和增长绩效。结果发现:(1)地方政府传统融资模式隐含着双重卸责动机,即"隐性担保"诱发的跨域卸责和"期限错配"诱发的跨期卸责,受传统政绩考评机制激励,"卸责组"省区形成相互仿效卸责的区域传染效应;(2)纵向失衡的财权事权配置框架、渐进放松的显性融资约束及地方政府同金融机构基于利益互联的隐性授信契约,成为卸责融资行为难以忽略的制度背景;(3)侧重增长绩效而非福利配置的制度安排,诱导地方政府扩张杠杆主要以市政建设和公共资产积累为导向,但西部落后省区表现出更强烈的短视卸责融资倾向,形成流动性风险的区域失衡;(4)卸责融资诱发非线性增长绩效门槛效应,跨越门槛的杠杆绩效趋降,但尚未明显阻滞增长,显性门槛值高于现行流动性风险警戒线,中长期执行警戒线仍有上调空间。本文的研究结论为新常态下的地方财政杠杆调整提供了依据。

The new proactive fiscal policies in China have gained increasing attention from academics, who have mainly focused on whether local government has borrowed too much to sustain a high growth rate, whether the increasing fiscal leverage will induce a fiscal crisis and how to deal with it if so. Our empirical observations indicate that the explicit leverage rate of local governments has not broken the warning line but is very close to it. The regional distribution of debt solvency risk is severely unbalanced, and Western provinces with a low GDP per capita have higher fiscal leverage rates. This paper tries to capture how the traditional debt financing pattern has reduced the effort of local governments to engage in internal risk control and induced a group of irresponsible financing preferences. It also tries to identify the rules that the central government should follow to adjust local fiscal leverage and maintain a balance between risk control and growth promotion. From the perspective of soft budgetary constraints, the literature finds that both emerging and high-income economies have two kinds of incentive to shirk responsibility, namely, the cross-regional incentive arising from ＂common pool＂ effect of bailout expectation and the inter-temporal incentive arising from the election competition game of different parties. These two incentives build an inverse U-shaped curve of growth performance for local government leverage. There are three theoretical explanations. The first is ＂crowding-out effect＂ of government borrowing. The second emphasizes the dispute between individual rationality and collective rationality. The third uses agency theory to prove that local officials may have an agency opportunism motivation and that their main purpose for debt financing is a self-interest preference rather than public need. However, more empirical evidence is needed to prove whether these theories can explain such facts in China. This paper uses the spatial econometric model and non-linear dynamic threshold method to evaluate the incentives and growth performance of local fiscal leverage from spatial and temporal perspectives. The empirical results indicate that provinces in the irresponsible group have a significant regional contagion effect. The reason is that the traditional cadre evaluation system focusing on growth performance instead of risk control intensifies the irresponsible financing competition in such a group. In the sensitive year of cadre promotion, party secretaries significantly strengthened irresponsible debt financing to highlight performance and increase the probability of promotion. In three types of intergovernmental transfer, the discretionary transfer dominated bailout expectations and irresponsible motivation, and the other two types of transfer reduced its effect. Furthermore, although local government debt financing implies irresponsible motivations, the dynamic growth performance threshold we estimate is at least 10 percentage points higher than the current risk warning line in China. Our study has four main findings. First, the traditional debt financing pattern of Chinese local governments creates a double incentive to shirk responsibility. Second, vertical imbalanced fiscal decentralization increasingly loosens explicit financing limitations and implicit credit contracts between local governments and financial institutions, providing the institutional background for local governments＇ shirking of responsibility. Third, less developed Western provinces show a stronger short-sign propensity for shirking responsibility. Fourth, local governments＇ irresponsible financing causes growth performance to have a non-linear threshold effect. The growth performance of fiscal leverage above the threshold value declines rapidly, but does not obviously impede growth. The explicit threshold value is still higher than the Chinese official risk warning line, which leaves policy space for the government to increase the mid-and long-term risk warning line. These results provide strategic choices for the adjustment of local fiscal leverage under the ＂new normal＂ economic situation.