纵向财政关系改革与基层政府财力保障:准自然实验分析

Vertical Intergovernmental Fiscal Relation Reform and Grassroots-level Government's Finance Guarantee: Based on Quasi-natural Experimental Analysis

基层政府的财力保障关系到整个国家财政职能的履行。如何调整政府间纵向财政关系以提升基层政府的财力水平,是加快建立现代财政制度的重要问题。近年来,省直管县财政体制改革的推行成为理顺政府间纵向财政关系的一项重要尝试,为实证研究纵向财政关系改革对县级基层政府财力保障的影响提供了准自然实验分析的条件。本文基于全国县级数据,利用倾向得分匹配-双重差分法(PSM-DID),研究省直管县这一纵向财政关系改革对县级可支配财力的影响,并且对其影响路径加以识别。研究结果表明,改革对县级可支配财力的提高具有显著促进作用;相比于本级财政收入,改革对上级转移支付的提升作用更为明显,说明改革更多的是通过约束地级市对县级转移支付的截留行为,实现了县级基层政府财力水平的提高。

Grassroots-level government’s finance situation is crucial to the performance of financial functions of the whole country. How to adjust the vertical intergovernmental fiscal relation in order to improve grassroots-level governments finance situation is important for accelerating the establishment of a modern fiscal system. In recent years, Province-Directly-Governing-County(PGC) fiscal reform has been an important attempt to straighten out vertical fiscal relations between governments at different levels, and has made it possible for studying the effects of vertical intergovernmental fiscal relation reform on grassroots-level government’s finance based on quasi-natural experimental analysis. Therefore, this paper researches empirically the PGC fiscal reform based on nationwide county-level data applying Propensity Score Matching with Difference-in-Differences Method(PSM-DID), in order to investigate the effect of the reform on county governments’ disposable revenue and identify the influence path. The results indicate that PGC fiscal reform has played an obvious role in increasing county governments’ disposable revenue, more in increasing upper-government transfer payment than in increasing the county-level own revenue. It means that the reform increases county governments’ disposable revenue mainly by restraining prefecture-level cities from grabbing county-level transfer.