财政支出的部门配置与中国产业结构升级——基于生产网络模型的分析

Intersectoral Allocation of Public Expenditure and the Upgrading of China's Industrial Structure:A Production Network Model

本文通过将生产网络引入一个多部门一般均衡模型,分析了财政支出的部门配置对GDP、福利和产业结构的影响。本文证明在较为一般的假设条件下,GDP(从而财政支出乘数)以及家庭福利与财政支出的部门配置无关,但产业结构受财政支出部门配置的影响。基于对部门财政支出结构效应的分解,本文利用中国投入产出表数据分析了财政支出部门配置的边际调整对产业结构升级的影响,发现将财政支出从“高污染、高耗能”的限制产业向高新技术产业调整1元最多可使高新技术产业增加值与限制产业相比提高0.9958元。本文的研究结论意味着财政支出政策的运用有望兼顾“稳增长”和“调结构”,即先从“稳增长”视角决定财政支出总量,再从“调结构”视角将财政支出配置在不同部门,从而为财政政策实施提供了新启发。

China's public expenditure has accounted for more than 20 percent of GDP in every year since 2000(Chang et al.,2016).This large public expenditure is allocated to various sectors of the economy.For example,infrastructure investment often involves government purchases of output in sectors such as construction.What is the impact on the economy if this money is allocated to education or other sectors?To understand how fiscal policy affects the economy,a number of related questions are worth exploring.Does the fiscal multiplier stay the same?Is residents'welfare affected?How does the industrial structure change?The above questions are of particular significance to the current Chinese economy.Fiscal policy has always been a key tool in the Chinese government's policy toolkit.To cope with the current complex and volatile international economic situation and to achieve high-quality development and successfully overcome the“middle-income trap”,fiscal policy must be more proactive.Optimizing the allocation of public expenditure is particularly important,especially in the context of the implementation of structural tax reduction.To give preliminary answers to these questions,we build a multi-sector general equilibrium model to analyze the aggregate and structural effects of public expenditure.To clarify whether the allocation of public expenditure has different effects in different sectors,it is necessary to clearly illustrate the economic links between these sectors.We introduce the models of production networks developed by Acemoglu et al.(2012),Acemoglu et al.(2016),Acemoglu et al.(2017),Baqaee&Farhi(2019),Liu(2019),and others into the analysis of fiscal policies.In a sense,this paper can be regarded as a preliminary attempt to introduce production networks into fiscal policy analysis.Under some standard assumptions,we prove that the allocation of public expenditure between different sectors does not have an aggregate effect,but only a structural effect.Specifically,the allocation of public expenditure does not change GDP,fiscal multiplier,or consumers'welfare.Only the industrial structure is affected by such allocation.One policy implication is that the goals of stabilizing growth and adjusting structure can be achieved simultaneously.First,total public expenditure can be determined through the perspective of stabilizing growth,which can expand the macro economy through the multiplier effect.Then,the sectoral allocation can be determined from the perspective of adjusting structure.As the unreasonable allocation of public expenditure may be one of the causes of the distortion of China's industrial structure,a new development dividend can undoubtedly be achieved by adjusting allocation to achieve the optimization of the industrial structure without affecting its driving effect on GDP.Our policy experiment shows that to optimize the industrial structure,the public expenditure can be transferred from restricted industries with high pollution and high energy consumption to high-tech industries.The adjustment of public expenditure by 1 RMB can increase the value-added of high-tech industries relative to restricted industries by 0.9958 RMB.This paper's contributions are as follows.First,it provides a simple reference for the multiplier effect of sectoral public expenditure.The neutral proposition proposed in this paper gives the conditions under which the sectoral allocation of public expenditure can be ignored when the multiplier effect of public expenditure is studied in the case of inter-sectoral input-output links,and it thus complements the existing literature on fiscal multipliers.Second,it provides new ways of thinking about the role of fiscal policy in upgrading industrial structures.We decompose the structural effect of sectoral public expenditure,and our key formula used for policy experiment is nonparametric and succinct.In this sense,we provide a preliminary theoretical basis for both stabilizing growth and adjusting structure in China.