县乡财政支出集权能增加地方民生性支出吗?——基于安徽省“乡财县管”准自然实验的证据

Can the Centralization of County and Township Fiscal Expenditure Increase Local People’s Livelihood Expenditure? Evidence Based on Quasi-natural Experiment of “Township Finance Supervised by County”System in Anhui Province

在巩固脱贫攻坚成果与全面推进乡村振兴有效衔接的重要时期,如何补齐基层民生短板、破解民生难题成为打好乡村振兴战役的关键问题。本文围绕行政性监管和公共品竞争双重视角,阐述财政支出集权影响地方民生性支出的逻辑机理。基于安徽省“乡财县管”改革,采用双重差分法识别其财政支出集权效应。研究表明:“乡财县管”财政支出集权,提高了县级政府统筹全县财政支出安排的权力,弱化了乡镇政府财政支出的自由裁量权,加剧了财政支出结构扭曲,挤占了地方民生性支出。该结论在一系列稳健性检验中仍然成立。机制分析表明:“乡财县管”财政支出集权通过强化地方政府“重基础设施建设,轻人力资本与社会保障”的财政资金错配行为,进而挤占地方民生性支出。研究认为,在中国式分权体制下,应加快构建县乡两级政府间的新型财政关系,适当提高乡镇政府的自由裁量权,以县乡财政“分灶吃饭”管理体制改革为抓手,全面推进乡村振兴;完善涵盖民生保障的综合绩效考核体系建设,加大转移支付支持基层民生保障力度,提高基本公共服务均等化水平。

In the important period of consolidating the achievements of poverty alleviation and effectively connecting with rural revitalization, how to make up for the shortcomings of the grassroots people’s livelihood and solve these problems has become the key issues in the rural revitalization campaign. This article focuses on the dual perspectives of administrative supervision and public goods competition, expounding the logical mechanism of fiscal expenditure centralization affecting local livelihood expenditure.Based on the reform of "township finance supervised by county" system in Anhui Province, the study uses the DID method to identify the effect of fiscal expenditure centralization. The research shows that the fiscal expenditure centralization increases the power of county-level governments to coordinate fiscal expenditure arrangements throughout the county, weakens the discretion of township governments in fiscal expenditures, intensifies the distortion of fiscal expenditure structure, and squeezes local livelihood expenditure. The conclusions are still valid in a series of robustness tests. Mechanism analysis shows that the fiscal expenditure centralization has squeezed out local people’s livelihood expenditure by strengthening the mismatch of local government financial funds, emphasizing infrastructure construction while neglecting human capital and social security. The study believes that under the Chinese-style decentralization system, the establishment of a new type of fiscal relationship between county and township governments should be accelerated, the discretion of township governments should be appropriately increased, and a reform of the county and township financial management system should be implemented as a starting point. We should improve the construction of a comprehensive performance evaluation system covering people’s livelihood security, increase transfer payments to support people’s livelihood security, and improve the level of equalization of basic public services provision.