不利冲击下经济增长恢复的经验——基于中国经济目标管理实践

The Experience of Economic Growth Recovery Under Adverse Shocks:Based on the Practice of China’s Economic Growth Target Management

中国经济遭遇不利冲击后总能够较快恢复增长。本文尝试基于目标对冲效应给出一个可能的解释:中国施行目标导向的宏观经济管理,当遭遇不利冲击时,经济向下偏离当年增长目标,政府迅速实施目标导向政策,对冲不利冲击的负面影响,从而经济较快恢复增长。本文贡献了一个识别目标对冲效应的方法,采用洪水这一准自然实验,实证分析发现:在2001—2016年间洪水对当年经济的负面冲击约为1.07个百分点,目标对冲效应约为1.11个百分点,对冲了洪水冲击的负面影响,经济快速恢复增长。本文还发现,遭受洪水的城市当年增加财政支出约1个百分点、减免税负规模约15个百分点、提高信贷规模约5个百分点。这些发现是稳健的,揭示了目标对冲效应在经济平稳增长中的关键作用。

China’s economic growth always recovered quickly from adverse shocks. Under the impact of the shock of the COVID-19, China’s economic growth dropped to 6.8% in the first quarter of 2020 and then recovered to 3.2%, 4.9% and 6.5% in the following three quarters respectively, showing a V-shaped recovery within one year. From China’s economic performance in the last three decades, we can also find similar patterns of economic recovery after every adverse shock like financial crisis in 1998 or 2008. Why can China’s economy recover quickly from these adverse shocks? This is undoubtedly an important issue that deserves widespread attention in such an increasingly complex and unstable international environment.We propose an explanation based on the long-term practice of setting economic growth targets in China: offsetting effect of targets. Specifically, when the economy suffers adverse shocks, economic growth slows down and deviates downward from the target. In order to eliminate the gap between economic growth and the target, local officials would rationally implement target-oriented policies to cushion the impact of adverse shocks, making the economy recover within a year. We define this process as the offsetting effect of targets.Theoretically, we prove the existence of the offsetting effect of targets within the framework of Weitzman(1976), and give a concise identification strategy. Considering a Weitzman framework in which local officials set a growth target and take responsibility for it, we find an optimal solution with offsetting effect of targets. We also show that the marginal offsetting effect of targets equals the difference between marginal effect of target on growth when there is an adverse shock and marginal effect of target on growth when there is no adverse shock. This means that the marginal offsetting effect of targets can be identified by comparing the marginal effect of target on growth in sample with adverse shocks and sample without adverse shocks. Based on this model, we contribute a concise identifying strategy for the offsetting effect.We use the flood as a measure of adverse exogenous shock to identify the offsetting effect of targets. We choose this measure for three reasons.(1) Governments announce targets at the beginning of years and the flood usually occurs in the middle of years.(2) Since the location of floods is accurate and the affected boundary is clear, it is easier to be measured.(3) Existing record and studies have shown that floods have a significantly negative impact on economic development. We then manually collected the data on flood for all cities in China from the National Hydrological Report issued by the Ministry of Water Resources. After matching with the city-level data on growth targets, we have a sample that consists of 155 cities that had suffered floods and 25 neighboring cities that were not flooded from 2001 to 2016.We empirically find that from 2001 to 2016, floods caused a decrease of annual economic growth by about 1.07 percentage points on average, and the offsetting effect of targets was about an increase of annual growth by 1.11 percentage points, which roughly offsets the negative impact of floods. This empirical finding obviously suggests a rapid recovery of growth from flood within one year. We conduct a series of robustness tests, including using alternative control group and treatment group, and using alternative measure of growth targets and floods. We also rule out three competitive explanations: the existence of other shocks, data manipulation, and pure flood relief effects.Finally, we examine the mechanism of offsetting effect of targets by identifying target-oriented policies from three aspects: fiscal expenditure, tax and credit. We empirically find that compared with cities without floods, the fiscal expenditures of flooded cities increase by about one percentage point, which equals an increase of about CNY 1.22 billion in fiscal expenditures;the tax is significantly reduced by about 15 percentage points, which equals a decrease of about CNY 17.9 billion in tax;the scale of credit increases by about five percentage points, which equals an increase of about CNY 41.9 billion in credit.Our empirical findings are very robust and consistent with the theoretical predictions. They indicate that economic growth targets have set direction for local government policies in China, which are conducive to the resistance against adverse shocks and stabilization of the economy. From the target of establishing well-off society at the beginning of the reform and opening-up to the target of high-quality development at the 19 th National Congress of the CPC, each target has set a direction and a development path. In this current situation of global uncertainty, the experience of China’s rapid recovery of growth can help to better understand the special role of target management.