地方财政自给与民生性支出偏向:理论分析与实证检验

Local Government’s Fiscal Self-sufficiency and Livelihood Expenditure Bias:A Theoretical Analysis and Empirical Test

本文立足于中国的制度现实特征,构建一个同时包含中央、地方政府、地方代表官员与居民等行为主体的理论解释框架。经逻辑推演发现,在地方财政自给度的持续提升过程中,由于民生治理绩效和经济治理绩效之间的政治经济收益具有明显差异性,地方政府增加民生性公共产品供给会造成地方代表官员的边际个人政治机会成本逐步增加,导致地方代表官员逐渐倾向于推动地方政府增加经济性公共产品供给,更加专注经济治理绩效,进而不断弱化地方政府民生性支出偏向。同时,利用2007至2017年间中国省级面板数据和地方代表官员的个人特征数据,使用计量方法检验地方财政自给度对地方政府民生性支出偏向的实际影响。实证结果始终显示:中国地方财政自给度确实会对地方政府民生性支出偏向产生抑制效应。

Based on the characteristics of China’s institutional reality,this paper constructs a theoretical explanatory framework that includes actors such as the central government,local governments,local representative officials and residents.Through logical deduction,it is found that in the process of continuous increase of local fiscal self-sufficiency,due to the obvious difference in political and economic benefits between livelihood governance performance and economic governance performance,increasing the supply of livelihood public goods by local governments will cause the marginal personal political opportunity cost of local representative officials to gradually increase.As a result,local representative officials are gradually inclined to push local governments to increase the supply of economic public goods and focus more on economic governance performance,which in turn continuously weakens local governments’livelihood expenditure bias.Meanwhile,using the provincial panel data and the personal characteristics data of local representative officials from 2007 to 2017,we use an econometric approach to examine the actual impact of local fiscal self-sufficiency on local governments’livelihood expenditure bias.The empirical results consistently show that the degree of local fiscal self-sufficiency in China does have a dampening effect on local governments’livelihood expenditure bias.