晋升激励与城市建设:公共品可视性的视角

Political Incentives and City Construction: The Visibility of Public Projects

本文首次从公共品可视性的视角考察了地方官员的晋升激励对城市维护建设的影响。估计结果显示,市委书记和市长任期与可视型公共品支出呈现出显著的倒U型关系,最高点出现在第三年,但这种显著关系在非可视型公共品则不存在。进一步的分析表明,官员任期与可视型公共品投入的倒U型关系对于上任年龄小于55岁的市委书记更为明显,对于上任年龄大于等于55岁的市委书记则趋于消失。过去主流文献聚焦于政绩考核中"核心指标"与"非核心指标"对官员激励与行为的不同影响,而本文通过进一步区分"可视性"与"非可视性"绩效,强调"可视性偏差"引致的官员行为的扭曲,从而拓展了我们关于绩效考核、官员激励及其影响的理解。

Compared with overground infrastructure, underground infrastructure is often neglected by city governments all over the world. For example, drainage systems, which are less visible than roads and bridges, face deliberate underinvestment in both developed and developing countries. China is no exception. Why are political officials willing to invest more in overground public projects than in underground ones? Mani & Mukand (2007) argue that the answer to this question lies in the difference in the visibility of these public projects. We argue in this paper that the logic of the explanation offered by Mani & Mukand (2007) can be easily applied to an authoritarian regime like China. The promotion of city officials depends on objective and subjective performance evaluations which are both subject to the visibility constraints faced by the voters in Mani & Mukand s (2007) model. Therefore, a “visibility bias” is also likely to occur in Chinese cities, with city officials tending to devote more fiscal resources to visible public goods and less to invisible ones. Based on this theoretical insight, this paper empirically investigates the effect of the political incentives of city officials on the provision of public urban projects with different visibilities. We define “visible fiscal expenditures” as maintenance and construction expenditures on roads, bridges, landscaping, and sanitation. Maintenance and construction expenditures on the water supply, gas supply, and sewerage systems are defined as “invisible expenditures”. Using a large city-level dataset, we find that there is an inverse U-shaped relationship between city officials tenure and visible expenditures. The fiscal expenditures on visible public projects start to increase from the first year of holding office and peak in the third year of a city official s term, which is typically a critical timing for performance evaluations. This relationship, however, does not show up in invisible expenditures. We separate the entire sample of city officials into two subsamples-those younger than 55 and those older than 55. The regression analysis based on these two subsamples shows that younger city officials tend to invest even more resources into visible public projects early in their terms, but again there is no significant relationship between their terms and expenditures on invisible projects. For officials older than 55, we do not observe any significant correlation between their time in office and expenditures on visible public projects. This paper contributes to the literature in the following ways. First, our study highlights the important role of subjective performance evaluations aided by field visits and interviews through which the visibility of performance projects kicks in but has been ignored in the literature. Second, our study contributes to the strand of the literature which investigates the negative effect of China s GDP-performance-oriented political tournaments. Our paper finds that even in the areas of public goods commonly neglected by local officials, city officials respond more strongly to more visible projects, such as landscaping and sanitation, than to less visible projects, such as sewerage systems. This evidence suggests that the visibility of government efforts is a new angle to look at when investigating the effect of the political incentives of local officials on the Chinese economy. Finally, our paper is closely related to the growing literature investigating the effects of local officials characteristics, especially tenure and age, on regional performance. We add to this literature by uncovering the impacts of the city officials term and age on the allocation of fiscal resources to visible and invisible projects. This paper has important policy implications. The Chinese central government should redesign performance evaluation systems to rebalance the incentives of local officials across economic and social areas of responsibility. It is important to place accountability on local officials that spans beyond their terms and draws their attention more to long-run development.