摘要
转移支付不确定性将带来地方政府财政收入波动的加剧,进而导致地方政府期望效用下降。为了减少这种效用损失,地方政府可能会改变财政支出结构以增加生产性支出拉动地区经济发展并维持财政收入的稳定。文章构建了一个理论框架阐释转移支付波动影响地方政府财政支出偏向的内在逻辑,并利用《全国地市县财政统计资料》中的县级面板数据开展实证检验。结果显示,转移支付不确定性显著加剧了地方政府财政支出偏向生产性活动,且该效应在中西部、转移支付净流入和财政自给率较低的地区更为凸显,表现为非对称特征。此外,上述结果通过了工具变量法、调整核心变量度量方式及控制其他重大事件等一系列稳健性检验。研究结论表明,转移支付波动会进一步加剧地方政府对社会性公共品供给的不足。
Government revenue is the source of funds for local governments to arrange fiscal expenditures and provide public services.With the completion of tax-sharing system reform in 1994,the financial capacity of the central government has been rapidly improved,but local governments face with increasing pressure on their budgets.The transfer payment system plays an important role in narrowing the gap among regions in economic development and public services.However,the problems with China’s transfer payment system are very obvious.In addition to the unreasonable structure,potential problems such as irregular allocation,opaque implementation and lacking supervision in the transfer payment budget management process are usually mentioned in the literature.These problems exist in the transfer payment system may directly restrict its effectiveness.Differing from previous studies that focus on the economic effects of the scale and structure of transfer payments,this paper discusses the impact of transfer payment volatility on fiscal expenditure bias from the perspective of uncertainty,which is a relatively new perspective.As a whole,transfer payment volatility caused by the inadequate management of government budget increases the uncertainty of local government revenues,leading to a decline in the expected utility of local governments.To avoid the utility loss,local governments tend to increase productive expenditures to stimulate regional economic development and maintain fiscal revenue stability.In detail,this paper builds a theoretical framework to demonstrate how transfer payment volatility affects local governments’fiscal expenditure bias in China,and then uses the county-level data to examine their relationships.The empirical results show that transfer payment volatility significantly aggravates local governments’fiscal expenditure bias towards productive activities,and the effect manifests an asymmetric feature,which is more prominent in central and western areas,and regions with lower net inflow of transfer payments and fiscal self-financing rates.In addition,the results pass through a series of robustness checks,including an instrumental variable method,adjustment of core variable measurement and accounting for other major events.Therefore,our findings reveal that,transfer payment volatility will further aggravate the insufficient supply of social public goods by local governments.In order to achieve the policy goal of equaling basic public services among regions during the period 2020-2025,which was mentioned in the report of the 19 th National Congress of the Communist Party of China,besides making steady progress in reforming the division of administrative authority and spending responsibilities between the central government and local governments,it is also necessary to standardize the budget management system of transfer payments to reduce the transfer payment uncertainty of local governments.
作者
刘贯春
周伟
Liu Guanchun;Zhou Wei(School of Public Economics and Administration,Shanghai University of Finance and Economics,Shanghai 200433,China)
出处
《财经研究》
CSSCI
北大核心
2019年第6期4-16,共13页
Journal of Finance and Economics
基金
国家税务总局2017年竞争性课题"中美税制竞争力分析研究"(2017110092)
作者简介
刘贯春(1990-),男,河南漯河人,上海财经大学公共经济与管理学院副教授;通讯作者:周伟(1991-),男,山东淄博人,上海财经大学公共经济与管理学院博士研究生。
