行政分权、财政分权与中国经济增长——来自县级证据

Administrative Decentralization,Fiscal Decentralization and China’s Economic Growth——Evidence from County Data

对改革开放以来我国取得的经济成就,现有文献主要围绕财政分权展开。除了财政分权,我国央地关系的调整也包括管理权下放,即行政分权。虽然改革开放后已积累了非常多行政分权实践,但致力于检验其作用的研究并不丰富。本文试图在一个统一框架下检验两种分权方式对经济增长的作用。基于2000—2010年间“扩权强县”改革样本并采用空间配比和双重差分方法,我们发现“扩权强县”改革能够显著促进县域经济增长。具体而言,在整个改革期间行政分权可以解释当地实际GDP增长的3%~5%。就作用机制来说,行政分权主要是通过扩大地方基本建设支出及提高财政支出效率来实现对经济的推动作用。

Since the reform and opening-up,China has experienced rapid economic growth.Existing literature mainly attributes the resulting economic achievement to the adjustment of central-local relations—fiscal decentralization.However,such strand of literature ignores another important perspective of central-local relations,namely,administrative decentralization.This paper aims to compare and examine the effects of these two kinds of decentralization through a unified framework.Based on the data from 2000 to 2010 of counties implementing the EPSC(Expanding and Strengthening Power of County)reform and using geography-matching and difference-in-differences approaches,we find that administrative decentralization significantly stimulates county economic growth.Specifically,administrative decentralization can explain 3%~5%of real GDP growth over the entire reform period.In terms of the mechanisms,administrative decentralization mainly promotes economic growth by expanding the expenditure on the local infrastructure and improving the efficiency of fiscal expenditures.