摘要
从20世纪90年代末到本世纪初,中国的农村经济发展面临不少问题。为进一步促进农村发展,中央政府出台了一系列改革措施以解决这些问题。具体而言,第一轮改革是2000—2005年实施的农村税费改革,主要目的是逐步降低并取消三农相关税费。2005年,为巩固第一轮改革成果,第二轮改革——农村综合改革——开始实施。此轮改革的总体目标是改革通过乡镇机构及县乡财政管理体制,以促进农村发展。改革的主要争论在于乡镇政府的机构定位,是给予其更多激励和更大自主权,还是应该绑住它们的手脚。本文旨在理解农村综合改革推出前后中国乡镇一级财政管理体制所发生的变化。利用在农村综合改革推出前后亲自采集的第一手数据,通过固定效应的多元分析发现,由于乡财县管政策(旨在加强县级政府对于乡镇财政的管理)的实施,乡镇政府的税收激励下降,乡镇一级的地方税收应随之减少。但由于可能存在其他因素,其中包括另一项政策——"三奖一补"——的出台,2004—2007年乡镇一级产生的税收仍然大幅上升。总体而言,我们的分析说明多数乡镇在改革后面临的税收激励明显下降,但富裕乡镇仍有较高的税收激励,改革实践表现出了较大灵活性。通过对比贫困乡镇与富裕乡镇,我们发现贫困乡镇如今的角色更像县级政府的代理,在财政管理上缺少自主权,而富裕乡镇在财政收支上保留了更大自主权。这一政策方向使得地区间的财力平衡变得必要。我们的数据显示通过改变乡镇的财政管理方式,农村综合改革促进了更广泛的财政平衡。
In the 1990s and early 2000s there were many problems that plagued the rural economy. In response, the central government launched a series of reform initiatives. The Tax for Fee Reforms(TFF Reforms) which were implemented between 2000 and 2005 and mainly directed at eliminating taxes and fees in China's villages. In 2005, Chinese leaders began to implement the second stage of the reform, called the Rural Comprehensive Reforms. The fiscal reforms targeted towns and the overall goal was to reshape rural fiscal management in order to stimulate growth and reduce the inequality among China's localities. The main question of the debate has been whether to provide town officials with more incentives and autonomy or to bind their hands. The overall goal of our paper is to improve our understanding of how the fiscal system is changing in China's towns after the launching of the Rural Comprehensive Reforms. To meet this goal, we use a set of panel data that we collected ourselves immediately before and after the launching of the Rural Comprehensive Reforms. We apply multivariate analysis with fixed effects and find that local tax revenues generated at the town level declined due to falling incentives after the implementation of one of the Rural Comprehensive Reforms policies—xiangcaixianguan(a policy targeted at increasing the control of county fiscal managers over town fiscal accounts). Despite the decline in revenues from xiangcaixianguan, other time-varying factors, including another policy called sanjiangyibu that provided county governments greater incentives to increase revenue collections still led town revenues to significantly increase between 2004 and 2007. Although, in general, our analysis suggests that incentives declined for most towns, we also show that China's fiscal reforms are not one-size-fits-all. By further decomposing our data into poor and rich towns, we find that poor towns are treated more as agents of counties with little autonomy in fiscal management(that is, they face few incentives to increase tax revenues) while better off towns remain more autonomous. This policy direction has allowed poorer towns to increase expenditures. We also show that the reforms have led to greater fiscal equalization. Almost all of the equalization effect is from the way the fiscal accounts have been managed in poor towns.
出处
《经济学报》
2014年第1期1-17,共17页
China Journal of Economics
