摘要
政府筹资模式转变与经济发展阶段和财税体制改革等密切相关。为实现财政可持续,为经济高质量发展提供财力保障,有必要研究地方政府筹资模式的调整机制与优化之策。本文利用1999—2016年中国地级市层级数据,借助取消农业税改革造成的地方财力紧缩构建强度双重差分模型,实证检验了财力紧缩对土地税收比率(土地出让收入与地方税收收入之比)的影响。研究结果发现,财力紧缩是造成地方政府筹资模式偏离税收、转向土地的重要原因,该结论不受变量设定和干扰性因素等影响,并通过了安慰剂检验。进一步的异质性分析表明,上述效应在土地出让收益较高和实施土地储备制度的地区更为突出,而在土地出让成本较高的地区有所减弱。本文研究表明,协同稳步推进央地财政关系改革、地方税体系建设和土地要素市场化配置有助于破解地方政府对土地融资的路径依赖,回归以税为主的筹资模式。
Raising fiscal revenue to supply public services is a basic function of local governments and an important material basis for national governance.From the perspective of government financing,standardized financing behaviors and sustainable fiscal resources are the premise and foundation for promoting the modernization of national governance.During the process of urbanization and industrialization,local governments have experienced an obvious change in the financing mode;that is,they tend to rely more on land finance than tax instruments to increase revenue.The reliance on land finance brings some negative effects such as declining fiscal sustainability and aggravated financial risks,which is not conducive to local economic development and fiscal security.Therefore,it is essential to clarify the driving factors of the local government financing mode deviating from tax revenue to land finance at the institutional level.The answers may help optimize the structure of fiscal revenue and establish a modern fiscal and tax system.Theoretically,local governments may increase tax collection efforts,land finance and other sources of revenue to ease their fiscal pressure.We proposed that the key to interpreting the evolution of the local government financing mode lies in the local fiscal pressure,which is derived from the fiscal relationship between the central government and local governments.To test this hypothesis,we defined the land-to-tax ratio(i.e.,ratio of land transfer income to tax revenue)to measure the evolution of the local government financing mode,and took the rural tax-for-fee reform as the quasi-natural experiment of fiscal pressure to overcome the endogeneity problem.Then,based on a panel data of 282 prefecture-level cities in China from 1999 to 2016,this paper used the difference-in-differences method to explore empirically the overall effects of fiscal pressure on the evolution of the local government financing mode and the heterogeneities in the effects.We found that the relative fiscal pressure caused by the abolition of agricultural taxes significantly improved the land-to-tax ratio,which was robust to alternative measures of fiscal pressure,methods for dealing with omitted variables and placebo test.Further heterogeneity analysis showed the following.(1)The impact of fiscal pressure on the evolution of the local government financing mode increased in cities with higher land transfer benefits and the implementation of the land reserve system,but decreases in cities with higher land transfer costs.(2)Compared with transfer by agreement,fiscal pressure had a more positive effect on land transfer income through tender,auction and listing.(3)The evolution of the local government financing mode was not driven by the authority for land transfer by law,but responded to the local fiscal pressure.Some policy insights can be drawn from the above conclusions.In order to reduce the dependence of local governments on land finance,it is necessary to establish the modern fiscal system that matches the powers of revenue collection with the responsibilities for expenditure.It should occur along with the scientific construction of a local tax system and the deepening reform of the rural land system.This paper contributes to the literature at three aspects.First,we use the rural tax-for-fee reform as an opportunity to capture an exogenous change in local fiscal pressure and systematically examine how fiscal pressure affects the evolution of the local government financing mode.We extend the literature by integrating the evolution of financing modes into the discussion of local government behaviors under Chinese"pressure-type"fiscal incentives.Second,unlike most studies focus on the increasing scale of land finance,we construct the index of land-to-tax ratio to directly reflect the degree of change from tax revenue to land finance.Moreover,this paper sheds light on the heterogeneities in the effects of fiscal pressure on the evolution of the local government financing mode,which provides more comprehensive empirical evidence for the research on this topic.Third,we manually collect the relevant documents of rural tax-for-fee reform and then adopt a more accurate measurement of fiscal pressure caused by the abolition of agricultural taxes.The pressure index that we construct advances an effective identification methodology for future studies.
作者
毛捷
曹婧
MAO Jie;CAO Jing(School of International Trade and Economics,University of International Business and Economics)
出处
《经济研究》
CSSCI
北大核心
2021年第3期83-99,共17页
Economic Research Journal
基金
国家社会科学基金重大项目(18ZDA097)
国家自然科学基金面上项目(72073141)的阶段性成果
关键词
政府筹资模式
土地税收比率
农村税费改革
取消农业税
Government Financing Mode
Land-to-Tax Ratio
Rural Tax-for-Fee Reform
Abolition of Agricultural Taxes
作者简介
毛捷,电子信箱:maojie@uibe.edu.cn,cjuibe@126.com;通讯作者:曹婧
