自然资源禀赋与地方政府的征税能力建设

Natural Resource and Tax Collection Capacity Building of Local Governments

寻找影响地方政府征税能力建设的因素对于应对当前中国地方政府面临的财政可持续性问题具有重要意义。本文构建一个政府的跨期优化模型分析了资源租对政府征税能力建设的影响,认为资源租的提高会抑制政府的征税能力建设。基于2000-2008年中国177个地级市的面板数据,本文的经验研究表明,资源依赖度的提高确实抑制了中国地方政府的征税能力建设,在改变被解释变量的度量方式以及考虑解释变量的内生性以后,该实证结果依然是稳健的;经验研究结果还表明,不同行政级别以及自然资源禀赋不同的地级市,自然资源禀赋对征税能力建设的影响存在显著差异。

Searching for the influencing factors on the construction of fiscal capacity of China’s local governments has outstanding significance under the background that lots of China’s local governments are facing rigorous fiscal unsustainability.This paper built an intertemporal optimization model to theoretically analyze the effect of natural resource rent on the construction of government’s tax collection capacity.The theoretical results revealed that more resource rent will lead to less tax collection capacity construction.Based on the panel data of 177 prefectural-level cities in China from 2000 to 2008,the empirical studies confirmed that the increase of natural resource dependence indeed restrained the tax collection capacity construction of China’s local governments.The results were robust even though changing the measure of capacity construction and considering the endogeneity of independent variable.Moreover,the empirical results also showed that natural resource had heterogenous effect on governments tax collection capacity construction in different types of prefectural-level cities and different cities with heterogenous natural resource endowment.