族群多样性、异质性偏好与省内财政分权安排

Ethnic Diversity, Heterogeneous Preference and Sub-Provincial Fiscal Decentralization

中国的省内财政分权是影响省内地区经济发展的重要因素之一,省内财政分权程度也存在较大差异,但什么因素导致省内财政分权存在如此大差异?本文构建一个简单的理论模型比较了地区分权与集权对居民效用的影响,发现族群多样性程度越高,分权对居民效用的提升作用越大,因此,政府分权的激励也就越大。为了验证这一点,本文使用全国人口普查数据和抽样调查数据计算了中国地级行政区层面的族群多样性指标,实证研究了省级政府与地级政府间财政分权同族群多样性之间的关系,实证研究表明,族群多样性越高的地区,以财政自给率和税收分成两种方法度量的财政分权程度都会较高,从而验证了本文的理论观点。进一步,本文使用2005年中国综合社会调查提供的关于居民对公共服务偏好的信息,发现一个地区的族群多样性越大,居民对公共服务偏好的差异也就越大,从而验证了本文所提出的机制。

Sub-provincial fiscal decentralization,which varies among different provinces,is one of the significant factors that affect the sub-provincial economic development.Where do these differences originate from?This paper proposed a simple theoretical model to compare the effect on resident utilities from centralization and decentralization.The theoretical analysis shows that more diverse the regional ethnic is,greater resident utilities the decentralization can raise than centralization,and more decentralized the governments will select.Measuring China’s prefectural-level regional ethnic diversity based on nationwide population census data and sampling survey data,this paper empirically tested the relation between prefectural-level ethnic diversity and sub-provincial fiscal decentralization in China.The empirical researches show that regions with higher ethnic diversity have higher sub-provincial decentralization,which confirms the theoretical proposition in this paper.Moreover,using the information about the individual preferences for public services from 2005 Chinese General Social Survey(CGSS 2005),this paper revealed that regions with higher ethnic diversity have higher heterogeneous preferences for public services,and higher heterogeneous preferences will lead to higher sub-provincial fiscal decentralization,which confirms the mechanism that ethnic diversity acting on sub-provincial fiscal decentralization.