政府绩效考核体系转型与城乡协调发展

Transformation of Government Performance Management System and Coordinated Urban-Rural Development in China

在政府绩效评价与考核体系中,过分重视短期经济增长,呈现所谓的“唯GDP主义”,不仅可能导致政府官员的短视行为,阻碍经济的高质量发展,还会产生忽视环境保护、民生改善与共享发展等的治理扭曲现象。在破除“唯GDP主义”的政府考核体系转型导向下,截至2022年末,省市级政府对495个区县政府的绩效评价取消了GDP考核的权重,为研究中国政府治理转型的社会经济影响提供了开展准自然实验的机会。本文构建多任务委托—代理模型,基于2008—2019年的县域面板数据,使用双重差分法评估了破除“唯GDP主义”的政府绩效考核转型对共享发展的影响。研究发现,绩效考核转型能够显著促进城乡居民收入增长及城乡收入差距缩小。进一步分析表明,在经济增长“指挥棒”弱化或消失后,若代之以偏向农村发展的“指挥棒”,则有利于强化对缩小城乡收入差距的促进效应。在作用机制上,绩效考核转型后县级政府通过助推第一产业发展、农村土地出让的初次分配政策与社会救助支出的再分配政策,促进了农村居民收入更快增长。这表明,政府绩效考核体系实现转型,辅之以农村偏向的强激励转换,有助于巩固拓展脱贫攻坚成果同乡村振兴的有效衔接,促进以缩小城乡收入差距为重要内容的共享发展。

The predominance of GDP growth as a goal in China's government performance management system has cast certain unfavorable impacts on high-quality socioeconomic development and shared prosperity. Since the 18th CPC National Congress, the Chinese government has repeatedly proposed to abolish “GDPism” and attach importance to highquality development and coordinated urban-rural development. To eradicate the dominance of “GDPism” and facilitate transformation, the superior government has eliminated the inclusion of the GDP index in the performance management system across 495 counties.This paper constructs a multi-task principal-agent model to show that after “GDPism” is abolished in the government performance management system, the local governments at the county level tend to reallocate their resources and efforts to the remaining goals in the system, especially to those where strong incentives are newly added after the transformation.Based on the county-level panel data from 2008 to 2019, this paper employs a difference-in-differences approach to evaluate the impacts of government performance management transformation on the urban-rural income gap. The findings indicate that the performance management transformation can significantly promote coordinated urban-rural development. Specifically, compared to counties without the transformation, the treated counties' urban-rural income ratios are 0.0413 smaller on average. The heterogeneity analysis of the different types of newly added incentives shows that the shrinking effects of the transformation on the urban-rural income ratio are stronger when the newly added incentives are more related to rural development. These results are consistent with the conclusions predicted by the multi-task principalagent model.This paper further studies the mechanism by which performance management transformation contributes to the reduction of the urban-rural income gap. At the macro level, the transformation makes county governments put more effort into rural residents' income growth. Specifically, after the government performance management transformation is performed, the county governments tend to increase social assistance expenditure, develop agriculture, improve agricultural labor productivity and increase land transfer in rural areas. All these efforts can be seen as corrections to “GDPism” and can benefit more rural residents' income growth. At the micro level, in counties with the government performance management transformation, rural households have a larger ratio of wage in their total income and individuals show higher probabilities of attending non-household and non-agricultural works.The contributions of this paper lie in the following aspects. First, as a study to evaluate the impact of government performance management transformation on coordinated urban-rural development, this paper offers both theoretical deduction and empirical evidence through the multi-task principal-agent model and difference-in-differences design. Second, this paper pays attention to the impacts of the establishment of new strong incentives on coordinated urban-rural development after the performance management transformation. Third, this paper further explores the transmission mechanism of the impacts of performance management transformation on the urban-rural income gap. Fourth, this paper provides some practical policy implications. The government performance management transformation can correct the distorted phenomenon of one-sided emphasis on economic growth in the old development model and provide conditions for the redistribution of local government's efforts to fulfill coordinated urban-rural development.