经济增长目标、税收特惠政策与资源配置

Economic Growth Target,Preferential Tax Policies and Resource Allocation

现有研究表明,经济增长目标既可引领经济增长,又会加剧资源错配。对此,本文提出一个逻辑自洽的解释:特惠政策。在理论上,本文证明当政府资源有限时,为了最大化辖区产出,政府采取偏向大企业的税收特惠政策来吸引流动性要素,从而增加辖区产出并加剧要素错配。在实证上,本文利用1998—2013年中国工业企业数据库和省级增长目标数据,实证发现:增长目标每增加1个百分点,税收减免特惠程度显著提高3.2%;税收特惠政策偏向大企业,而不是偏向中小企业;在增长目标激励下,税收特惠政策加剧地区内的资本和劳动力错配。本文揭示了地方政府为达成经济增长目标而实施特惠政策的普遍做法,表明新时代发展需要转向普惠政策,提高发展质量。

Existing studies find that growth targets simultaneously promote economic growth and lead to resource misallocation.This paper provides a logically consistent explanation:preferential policies.In theory,we prove that when local governments have limited administrative resources,the local governments give large firms special deals to attract mobile factors,which increases output and creates resource misallocation within the region.In terms of empirical research,we use the annual survey on industrial firms from 1998 to 2013 matched with provincial growth targets during the same period and find that:(1)For every 1 percentage point increase in the growth target,the degree of preferential tax abatement significantly increases by 3.2%on average;(2)Preferential tax abatement is for big enterprises,instead of medium or small enterprises;(3)Motivated by growth targets,preferential taxation abatement exacerbates the misallocation of capital and labor in the region.Our findings reveal the common practices of local governments implementing preferential policies to reach economic growth targets,indicating that development in the new era needs to shift to inclusive policies and improve the quality of development.