行政分权对公共支出的影响——基于“扩权强县”准实验分析

The Effects of Administrative Decentralization on the Public Expenditure:A Quasi-Experimental of “Expanding and Strengthening Power of County”

扩权强县是我国近年来推行的一项重要行政分权改革。本文利用双重差分实证策略探讨了其对地方公共服务支出的影响。具体来说,本文利用地理信息系统软件Arc GIS提取改革县的接壤县,并将改革县和接壤县分别作为政策评估的实验组和对比组。在细分公共品支出项目基础上,研究发现扩权这一行政改革使得地方县级政府偏爱那些能够带来经济增长的公共服务项目,比如基本建设支出;而忽略那些能够改善国民社会文化的民生类公共项目,比如教育支出。这一发现与已有文献关于中国政治官员激励的研究结论相一致。

ESPC （Expanding and Strengthening Power of County） is an important administrative decentralization reform in China in recent years. Applied with DID method, this paper discusses the effect of administrative decentralization reform on local public service expenditure. By using the geographic information system software ArcGIS, we extracted information of the bordering counties of the reform counties, and set reform county as treated group and bordering counties as control group. Having subdivided items on which public expenditure is used, this study found that, under the administrative reform to expand local power, local governments at the county level preferred projects which can stimulate economic growth obviously, such as infrastructure expenditure, while ignoring public service projects that are of benefits to people＇ s livelihood, such as social or cultural program. These discoveries are in line with conclusions in the existing literature on China＇ s political motivation.