纵向失衡与地方政府的无效率—基于中国市县的实证研究

Since the tax-sharing reform in 1994, the Chinese fiscal system has exhibited a marked vertical fiscal imbalance (VFI)—a mismatch between expenditure and revenue assignments—at the local levels, which may cause the common-pool problem in local governments' behavior, including overexpansion of government expenditure, occurrence of soft budget constraint and “soft finance”. Those distortionary behaviors hamper economic growth and people’s welfare. This project means to collect the most disaggregate fiscal and economic panel data at the prefectural and county level from the 1990s to the most recent. By employing those data we study the impacts of vertical fiscal imbalance on various government behaviors. In addition, we are able to conclude the causal relationship between VFI and local governments’ inefficiency through the analysis on VFI’s influences on local economic growth.

现今中国财政体制最突出问题之一是纵向失衡，即财权与事权不匹配。财政学的经典理论指出，纵向失衡会扭曲政府支出的收益和成本，导致政府规模膨胀，政府层级体系内的预算软约束，地方政府从国企和银行寻求“软贷款”等问题。而这些扭曲性的政府行为会阻碍地方经济的发展，产生政府失灵，但是相关的实证研究却很少。本研究拟利用中国过去近二十年省以下政府的财政和地区经济的大样本数据库，分析纵向失衡对地方政府行为以及地方经济发展的影响，结合中国实践探讨纵向失衡是否会导致地方政府行为的无效率以及其主要途径，进而为中国下一步财税改革提供严谨的事实依据。研究内容包括：1）系统的搜集和整理数据，构建过去近二十年中国市县财政、经济的大样本面板数据库；2）全面的刻画我国省以下地方政府的财政结构，包括政府规模、收支结构、分权程度和纵向失衡的程度；3）利用计量回归的分析方法，研究纵向失衡对地方政府各种行为和地区经济增长的影响。