地方政府短视问题再考察:财政联邦、晋升锦标与地方支出结构

Are Local Governments Myopic?Fiscal Federalism,Promotional Tournament and Public Expenditure in China’s Prefecture-Level Governments

地方政府的行为是否经常流于短视?两大主流理论——“晋升锦标赛”与“财政联邦制”对此有着迥然不同的看法,为厘清二者分歧,本研究利用2000—2018年的地市财政支出数据分析了地方政府的行为模式。研究发现,地方政府越能自主支配其财政资源,越会将资源投往长期发展的方向,而官员个体的政治激励对政府行为并无显著影响。机制检验显示,随着时间推移,地方政府会主动学习,持续改进其资源配置模式。此外,稳定的制度安排有利于创造可置信承诺,助力地方的可持续发展。这一发现为央地关系的良性互动提供了新的思路与规划方向。

Fiscal Federalism and Promotional Tournaments are two mainstream theories that explain China’s local governments,which have very different views on the myopia problem of China’s local governments.Given the obvious discrep⁃ancy,the paper proposes a series of empirical tests based on the data of prefec⁃ture-level cities from 2000 to 2018.We find that the more autonomous the lo⁃cal governments on their control over fiscal resources,the more fiscal resources would flow into the sustainable growth sectors.The political incentives to offi⁃cial individuals,however,have no significant impact on government behaviors.Furthermore,the local governments had been learning and adjusting to improve their resource allocation.In addition,stable institutional arrangements,constitut⁃ing credible commitments,would further encourage governments to pursue sus⁃tainability.Our findings thus suggest that we need to reflect on and project the positive relationship between the central and local governments in China.