政治资源禀赋的经济效应——来自长征沿线地区发展的证据

Economic Effects of the Political Resource:Based on the Long March

本文首次采用计量分析方法考察了作为政治资源禀赋的长征事件对我国县域发展的影响及作用机制。研究发现,相比于地理环境等先天发展条件类似的周边非长征县,长征这一因素使得沿线县级政府的预算支出和预算缺口更高,然而它并没有使当地GDP以及人均城乡收入获得相对提升。对于长征经济效应的产生机制而言,一方面,长征因素使得沿线县更容易获得革命老区县和国家级贫困县"帽子",从而可以获得更多转移支付资金扶持;另一方面,长征沿线县也会出现更多财政资金违规使用金额,支出更多的行政管理费用,以及承担更多的财政供养人口,进而增加了当地经济发展的拖累因素。在政策内涵层面,我国中央政府需要加强对长征沿线地区政府预算支出的监督管理,确保扶持资金的使用规范性和有效性,以最终实现长征沿线与周边非长征沿线地区的平衡发展。

Summary： The Long March is a miracle in Chinese history. From October 1934 to October 1936, the Chinese Red Army underwent many arduous struggles through 14 Chinese provinces and successfully opened up a bright road for Chinese revolution. This landmark historical event has given the Long March counties a kind of region-based political resource. Under the background of China＇s unique governance structure, can this political resource endowment exert an influence on the fiscal behavior of county-level governments on the Long March route？ We want to know if there are any differences between the characteristics of the Long March counties and their surrounding counties with similar natural conditions. If the Long March has had a lasting impact, how did it happen？ Using empirical analysis methods, this paper investigates the impacts of the Long March in the mid-1930s on Chinese counties＇ development and its mechanism. This paper finds that compared with the surrounding non-Long March counties, the Long March counties have higher budget expenditures and budget gaps. However, the Long March is not conducive to improving the GDP of the Long March counties, or urban and rural incomes. A Long March county has a higher probability of being an old revolutionary county or state poverty county and thus obtaining more preferential policies or fiscal support from the Chinese central government. However, a Long March county is more likely to have misuse of financial funds, more administrative expenses, and a more fiscal-supporting population. These phenomena have increased the institutional cost in Long March counties, inhibiting their economic development. For strategic reasons, the Chinese Red Army preferred to travel by back roads in the poorest regions. Therefore, we need to ensure that our conclusions about the economic effects are rooted in the Long-March event itself rather than in some other congenital geographical conditions. This paper tries to weaken the endogenous problem caused by the omitted variables through the following measures. First, based on the principle of making the geographical conditions as similar as possible, only non-Long March counties surrounding the Long March counties are selected as the control group. We select prefecture-level cities based on the criterion of having at least one Long March county and then put all of the counties under these prefecture-level cities as the estimation sample. Second, we add as many exogenous geographic control variables as possible. Concretely, in addition to controlling the distances from the sample counties to provincial capitals and prefecture-level cities, we also control the average elevation and slope of the counties. Third, using a limited number of county-level samples and population information before the Long March, we eliminate the concern regarding unobservable omitted variables. The logic is that if there are some unobservable omitted variables that we cannot control in the regression, their impacts should also appear before the Long March happened. The corresponding regression results show that regarding the limited number of county- level samples before the Long March happened, there is no need to worry about the omitted variables problem. The conclusion of this paper is helpful in that it objectively evaluates the performance of funds support to the revolutionary base regions in China and its policy implications. To ensure the allocation efficiency of funds support, the Chinese central government needs to strengthen the supervision of the budget expenditures of Long March counties. However, the political resource endowments of the Long March counties do not significantly promote lhe relative increase of GDP and residents＇ income. The Chinese central government may need to make efforts to increase the efficiency of the local fiscal expenditures of underdeveloped counties, ensure the effectiveness of fiscal funds allocation through various measures, and moderately restrict the proportion of administrative expenses and the fiscal-supporting population of the Long March counties. The purpose of these measures is to achieve balanced development between the Long March counties and their surrounding counties.