地方政府税收竞争助推了经济发展不平衡吗——基于劳动力流动的视角

Does Local Government Tax Competition Exacerbate the Imbalance of Economic Development?——From the Perspective of Labour Mobility

立足新时代中国社会主要矛盾的根本转变和经济转向高质量发展这一新目标,科学厘清地方政府税收竞争与地区经济发展不平衡之间关系,不仅有利于通过规范地方政府间税收竞争加快推进现代财政制度基本框架的确立,还可以促使地方政府以新发展理念为指引,切实推动经济高质量发展。本文从理论层面系统诠释地方政府税收竞争与经济发展不平衡之间的关系及其影响机制,然后构建包含双重固定效应的空间杜宾模型,实证考察地方政府税收竞争对经济发展不平衡的影响效应。本文发现:(1)地方政府之间不仅存在策略互动的税收竞争行为,而且对于地区经济发展不均衡具有正向影响,即地区间税收竞争越激烈,经济发展不平衡程度越高;(2)异质性检验显示,地方政府税收竞争的核心主要源于对营业税和所得税税基的争夺,而且在人口规模较大的城市中该效应更为明显;(3)机制分析表明,地方政府税收竞争主要通过改变劳动力要素的数量和质量对地区经济发展不平衡产生影响。对于上述研究结论,通过改变空间权重矩阵与核心变量的测度方法等进行稳健性检验依然成立。

Based on the fundamental change of the main contradiction of Chinese society in the new era and the new goal of shifting the economy to high-quality development,a scientific clarification of the relationship between local government tax competition and regional economic development imbalance not only is conducive to accelerating the establishment of the basic framework of a modern fiscal system,but also can prompt local governments to promote highquality economic development with the new development concept as the guide.This paper firstly systematically interprets the relationship between local government tax competition and economic development imbalance and its influence mechanism from the theoretical side.Then it constructs a spatial Durbin model with two-way fixed effects to empirically examine the effect of local government tax competition on economic development imbalance,and finds that:(1)there is not only strategic interaction between local governments in tax competition behavior,but also has a positive effect on regional economic development imbalance,i.e.,the more intense the inter-regional tax competition is,the higher the degree of economic development imbalance is;(2)the test of heterogeneity shows that local governments’tax competition mainly stems from the competition for business tax and income tax base,and the effect is more evident in cities with larger population sizes;(3)Mechanism analysis shows that local governments'tax competition mainly affects the imbalance of regional economic development by changing the quantity and quality of labor factors.The above findings are still found to be valid by changing the spatial weight matrix and the core variables'measures.