腐败、反腐败和中国县际收入差距

中国经济的快速增长和地区间收入差距紧密相联。虽然目前大部分研究文献都用经济因素来解释这一问题,但文章认为,地方政府的反腐败力度也是影响地方收入水平的重要因素。通过利用中国县级横截面数据以及采用普通最小二乘法,文章发现,反腐败力度越大的县的收入水平越高。利用最近发展起来的夏普里值分解法来量化各个解释变量对收入差距的贡献率,文章还发现,反腐败是解释中国县际收入差距的一个重要因素。

Corruption, Anti-corruption, and Inter-county Income Disparity in China

Rapid economic growth in China is closely linked to the large income gap across regions. While most existing research has focused on economic factors to explain the problem, we argue that local government’s anti-corruption endeavors also play a very significant role in influencing local income levels. Using county-level data and Ordinary Least Square (OLS) estimates, we find counties with a higher degree of anti-corruption efforts tend to have higher income measured by county-level per capita GDP. We also employ the recently developed Shapley value decomposition technique to quantify the contributions of each variable. We find that anti-corruption efforts play a large role in explaining inter-county income disparity in China.