省以下分权式改革对城乡收入差距的影响研究——基于区县分化的视角

The Impact of Sub-Provincial Decentralization Reform on Urban-Rural Income Gap--From the Perspective of Differentiation Between Municipal Districts and Counties

省以下的财政分权改革不仅是影响经济增长的关键因素,对缩小城乡差距也有重要作用。本文从区县分化的视角切入,以地市级为观察层面,采用地级市和市辖区两个维度的数据,研究以“省直管县”为代表的省以下财政分权改革是否缩小了区县的经济社会差距,进而降低了整体的城乡收入差距。研究发现,向县级政府分权降低了区、县在财力、教育、社保和经济方面的差距,最终通过显著增加农村居民的人均收入而缩小城乡收入差距。异质性分析表明,改革的效应在中部地区、南方地区和“强市-弱县”组表现得更明显。进一步的讨论发现,政府竞争、监督机制是影响分权改革效应的重要因素。

The sub-provincial fiscal decentralization reform is not only a key factor affecting economic growth,but also plays an important role in narrowing the gap between urban and rural areas.This paper starts from the perspective of differentiation between municipal districts and counties,takes prefecture-level cities as the observation object,and uses the data of prefecture-level cities and municipal districts to study whether the subprovincial fiscal decentralization reform represented by“Province-Managing-County”has narrowed the gap in economy and society between urban districts and other county-level regions,and thus reduced the overall urbanrural income gap.We find that decentralization to county-level governments reduces the gap in financial resources,education,social security,and economy between municipal districts and counties,ultimately narrowing the urbanrural income gap by significantly increasing the per capita income of rural residents.Heterogeneity analysis shows that the effect of the reform is more evident in the central region,the southern region and the“strong city-weak county”group.Further discussion shows that government competition and supervisory mechanisms,are important factors affecting the effects of decentralization reforms.