土地出让:以地生财还是引资晋升——针对两类用地市场的分析

Land Transfers and Promotion in China: Pursuing Fiscal Revenue or Attracting Investment

针对现有的地方政府土地出让动机,主要有两种立场争锋相对的分析视角,即“财政联邦”观点下的“土地财政假说”与“晋升锦标”框架下的“土地引资假说”。前者强调发展工业是服务于商住或各类收入获取,后者则侧重工业引资等保证发展经济、创造业绩,两类分析视角对于工业用地市场与商住用地市场的机制分析路径正好迥异,因此通过辨析两类用地市场之间的相互关系,可以分辨两大理论的适用性。基于中国地级市2003—2014年的数据经验检证发现:工业用地出让的确能够短期内联动促进商住用地的出让收入;反之,源自土地市场的收入并无显著促进短期内的固定资产投资或持续性的经济增长率。因而“财政联邦”视角针对上述两类市场相互联动、目的在扩大地方财政收入的解释,最贴合土地经营的实际情况。

Two competing hypotheses explain China’s economic growth over the past decades;fiscal federalism and promotion tournaments.The first stresses raising fiscal revenue for local government,and the second focuses on the economic performance of local cadres.Despite the disagreement over the applicability of the two hypotheses,until this study,they had never been applied to the case of land-based government revenues.A prominent feature of land management in China’s local governments is the combination of two separate land transfer markets;“discounted transfers for the industrial-used land”and“market-priced transfers for commercial-and residential-used land.”Fiscal federalism offers a revenue-driven explanation for the different markets while the promotion tournament hypothesis proposes a performance-led justification.In the study,we used land-transfer data from all of China’s prefecture-level cities from 2003 to 2014 to verify the validity of the two hypotheses.The findings are two-fold.First,the total transfers of industrial land significantly increased the average area and price of the commercial-and residential-use land,thereby raising the total land revenue derived from land leasing.Secondly,land revenuesdid not significantly increase the value of fixed assets which would have increased economic growth.These findings show that fiscal federalism is the more powerful hypothesistoillustrate the different strategies of land management in today’s China.