贸易开放、人口规模与中国地方政府规模：驱动还是补偿*

针对贸易开放、人口规模和中国地方政府规模之间联系究竟是驱动促成还是补偿所致的争论，本文基于中国29个省份1978—2013年三个维度样本数据，首先考察三者之间的关系，研究发现贸易开放对地方政府规模具有正向影响，人口规模对地方政府规模的影响不确定，人口规模对贸易开放存在正向影响。采用多种内生性处理方法的估计表明，贸易开放对地方政府规模的正向影响是因果性的。上述结论在不同的估计方法、数据类型、模型设定下均十分稳健。人口规模并未在贸易开放与中国地方政府规模的正向联系中起到居间驱动作用，贸易开放基于风险补偿机制直接推动了中国地方政府规模的不断膨胀。因此，伴随“一带一路”的有序推进，适度提高地方政府在民生领域的支出规模可能势在必行。     

The long run relationship between openness and government size: evidence from bounds test

The bounds test is applied to determine the existence of a level relationship between government size, openness, terms of trade volatility, and external risk using time series data from Australia, Canada, England, Norway, Sweden, and the USA. Bounds test results show that the existence of a long run relationship in the USA and Canada, but not in any of the other countries. Long run parameters are estimated using both autoregressive distributed lag and FM-OLS procedures. Results vary from country to country, with some evidence that government size is significantly affected by openness and terms of trade volatility. However, contrary to argument and evidence developed using cross-section data, empirical evidence presented in this paper show that the size of the government has not changed to mitigate the effect of increased income risks associated with greater openness.     

State capacity and the quality of policies. Revisiting the relationship between openness and government size

Countries with different levels of state capacity have access to different sets of policies. In particular, countries with strong state capabilities are able to draw from a broader menu of policies than countries with lower capabilities. We apply and test this insight to the case of exposure to trade‐related risk. So far, most of the literature has considered that only one type of policy—the one that increases government size—can help to overcome the challenge imposed by openness. However, there are a number of policies that can mitigate trade‐induced risks, many of which do not have the necessary implication of increasing public spending. Yet, many such policies require governmental capabilities not available to any country. For that reason, while the choice of a particular policy within a menu depends on political conditions, the relationship between openness and the size of government might be mediated by the capabilities of states. This paper provides reduced form evidence confirming that the empirical relationship between openness and government size is conditional on state capabilities. Therefore, public policies cannot be assessed independently of the capacity of the State that would have to implement them.     

开放真的导致政府规模扩大吗?-基于跨国面板数据的研究

本文对184个国家1980-2008年的面板数据分析表明,开放程度与政府规模的关系由两种力量作用所决定:一种力量是开放所带来的外部风险冲击,另一种是外部竞争压力带来的国内市场化改革。对于发展中国家而言,两者作用使得开放程度与政府规模呈现倒U形变化;对于发达国家,由于其应对风险的能力强,使得开放程度与政府规模呈现负相关关系。对于中国的省级面板数据分析发现,两者作用使得开放程度与政府规模在东部呈负相关,在中西部呈正相关。     

Country size and the rule of law: Resuscitating Montesquieu

In this paper, we demonstrate that there is a robust negative relationship between the size of country territory and a measure of the rule of law for a large cross-section of countries. We outline a framework featuring two main reasons for this regularity; firstly that institutional quality often has the character of a local public good that is imperfectly spread across space from the core of the country to the hinterland, and secondly that a large territory usually is accompanied by valuable rents and a lack of openness that both tend to distort property rights institutions. Our empirical analysis further shows some evidence that whether the capital is centrally or peripherally located within the country matters for the average level of rule of law.     

Government size,government debt and globalization

This article empirically investigates the effect of globalization on government size and debt. Using panel heterogeneous cointegration techniques to a panel of developing and developed countries, it finds that globalization reduces government size and debt. In terms of components of globalization, government size is found to increase with trade openness but decreases with financial, social and political globalization. On the other hand, government debt increases with financial and trade openness but decreases with social and political globalization. The evidence is robust to different estimation methods and different samples. Our data also indicate unidirectional causality running from globalization measures to government size and debt.     

Economic performance,government size,and institutional quality

This paper studies the empirical link between government size, institutions and economic activity using a panel of 140 countries over 40 years. Our results, robust under different econometric techniques, show mostly a negative effect of government size on output, while institutional quality has generally a positive impact. Moreover, the detrimental effect of government size on economic activity is stronger the lower institutional quality, and the positive effect of institutional quality on output increases with smaller government sizes.     

Openness, Government Size and the Terms of Trade

This paper investigates the relationship between trade openness and the size of governments, both theoretically and empirically. We argue that openness can increase the size of governments through two channels: (1) a terms-of-trade externality, whereby trade lowers the domestic cost of taxation, and (2) the demand for insurance, whereby trade raises risk and public transfers. We provide a unified framework for studying and testing these two mechanisms. Our main theoretical prediction is that the relative strength of the two explanations depends on a key parameter, namely, the elasticity of substitution between domestic and foreign goods. Moreover, while the first mechanism is inefficient from the standpoint of world welfare, the second, instead, is optimal. In the empirical part of the paper, we provide new evidence on the positive association between openness and government size and we explore its determinants. Consistent with the terms-of-trade externality channel, we show that the correlation is contingent on a low elasticity of substitution between domestic and foreign goods. Our findings raise warnings that globalization may have led to inefficiently large governments.     

Trade openness and government size of small developing countries

This paper examines the causal effect that trade openness has on government size in small developing countries (SDCs). We use the construction of the trade cost variables based on Baltic Dry Index in primary goods as instruments of trade openness to address the endogeneity issue. We find that the increase in trade openness leads to an increase in government size: a 1 percent expansion in trade openness (trade GDP ratio) raises government consumption over GDP ratio by approximately 0.1–0.2 percentage points on average. Its quantitative significance emphasizes the importance of rethinking the costs and benefits of trade openness for SDCs.     

Fiscal decentralization and government size: The role of democracy

This paper examines how the level of democracy in a country affects the relationship between fiscal decentralization and government size. We argue that political regimes, proxied by their democracy levels, are important for different decentralization theories to predict the impact of fiscal decentralization on government size. We test this argument using panel data from 76 developed and developing countries during 1972–2013. We find strong and robust evidence that fiscal decentralization is negatively associated with government size and that a higher level of democracy tends to mitigate the negative impact of fiscal decentralization. Therefore, our study contributes to the literature by offering a novel insight on mixed results regarding the relationship between fiscal decentralization and government size in the literature.     

Trade facilitation and country size

It is argued that compared with large countries, small countries rely more on trade and therefore are more likely to adopt liberal trading policies. The present paper extends this idea beyond the conventional trade openness measures by analyzing the relationship between country size and the number of documents required to export and import, a measure of trade facilitation. Three important results follow. First, trade facilitation does improve as country size becomes smaller; that is, small countries perform better than large countries in terms of trade facilitation. Second, the relationship between country size and trade facilitation is nonlinear, much stronger for the relatively small than the large countries. Third, contrary to what existing studies might suggest, the relationship between country size and trade facilitation does not appear to be driven by the fact that small countries trade more as a proportion of their gross domestic product than the large countries.     

外部风险对中国地方政府规模的影响

本文利用我国28个省市区1978—2006年的数据,分析了我国外部风险对地方政府规模的影响。研究发现,在当前我国更为开放的市场经济中,外部风险导致了地方政府规模的扩大,且外部风险与社会保障和社会福利支出显著正相关。为了抵御外部风险,必须把一部分经济资源配置到政府部门,以增加社会保障和社会福利等方面的支出。     

Borders and Growth

This paper presents a framework to understand and measure the effects of political borders on economic growth and per capita income levels. In our model, political integration between two countries results in a positive country size effect and a negative effect through reduced openness vis-à-vis the rest of the world. Additional effects stem from possible changes in other growth determinants, besides country size and openness, when countries are merged. We estimate the growth effects that would have resulted from the hypothetical removal of national borders between pairs of adjacent countries under various scenarios. We identify country pairs where political integration would have been mutually beneficial. We find that full political integration would have slightly reduced an average country's growth rate, while most countries would benefit from a more limited form of merger, involving higher economic integration with their neighbors.     

Population size and the size of government

We examine the effect of population size on government size for a panel of 130 countries for the period between 1970 and 2014. We show that previous analyses of the nexus between population size and government size are incorrectly specified and fail to consider the influence of cross-sectional dependence, non-stationarity and cointegration. Using a panel time-series approach that adequately accounts for these issues, we find that population size has a positive long-run effect on government size. This finding suggests that effects of population size that increase government size (primarily due to the costs of heterogeneity, congestion, crime and conflict) dominate effects that reduce government size (primarily due to scale economies).     

Government size,democracy, and corruption: An empirical investigation

Previous studies on the effect of government size on corruption have produced mixed results. In an attempt to explain these ambiguous results, this study investigates the effect of government size on corruption by taking into account the role of the democracy in each country. Using annual data of 82 countries between 1995 and 2008, the estimation results indicate that an increase in government size can lead to a decrease in corruption if the democracy level is sufficiently high and, in contrast, can lead to an increase in corruption if it is too low. As robustness checks, the estimations using a different index of corruption and a different proxy for government size are also conducted. The results reveal that our main findings are robust. Furthermore, to address endogeneity problems, we conduct the instrumental variables estimation and the system generalized method of moments estimation, the results of which also support our primary findings. These results provide some important implications for policymakers seeking to perform government interventions without aggravating corruption.     

腐败对外国直接投资影响的实证分析

本文依据世界106个国家的截面数据．分析了腐败对外国直接投资（FDI）的影响。研究结果表明，腐败与FDI之间存在显著的负相关。但是，腐败对FDI的负面影响可以在一定程度上被诸如东道国经济开放和政治稳定等积极因素所抵消。     

Political Economy of Trade Openness and Government Size

This paper proposes a theoretical model that may provide useful insights into the relationship between trade openness and the size of government, as well as a possible explanation for the results of empirical tests of such a relationship. We develop a Hecksher–Ohlin model with publicly provided goods, where the level of publicly provided goods is determined in a probabilistic voting framework. In this context, we show that the start of trade may increase or decrease government size depending on the capital‐labor ratio in each country.     

TRADE OPENNESS: AN AUSTRALIAN PERSPECTIVE

Australia's external trade is relatively low compared with the size of its economy. Indeed, Australia's openness ratio (exports plus imports as a proportion of GDP) in 2002 was the third-lowest among the 30 OECD countries. This paper seeks to understand Australia's low openness by analysing the empirical determinants of aggregate country trade. We present an equation for country openness which explains a substantial amount of the cross-country variation. The most important explanators of openness are population and a measure of distance to potential trade partners. Countries with larger populations trade less, as do countries that are relatively more remote. Furthermore, after controlling for trade policy there is little evidence of a positive correlation between openness and economic development. The openness equation suggests that Australia's level of trade is relatively close to what would be expected. The most important factors in explaining Australia's low openness ratio are its large geographic size and distance to the rest of the world.     

贸易开放、引致性就业调整与我国地方政府实际支出规模变动

贸易开放如何影响政府支出规模变动?补偿假说和效率假说提出了截然相反的判断。本文通过强调Rodrick模型忽略的就业调整及调整成本,在指出已有文献得出相互矛盾结论症结所在的同时,还发现:我国地方政府支出的不同细目特点各异,而且不同细目的名义与实际规模也存在不同变化趋势;贸易开放促进了我国地方政府实际投资性、转移支付支出效率的提高;除了政府支出计划性和规模变动的惯性外,实际投资性支出规模的变动主要由预期风险引致的劳动力流动和贸易引起,实际消费性支出规模的变动则是由贸易引致的负向劳动力流动、地区规模和抚养率引起,而显著影响实际转移支付规模的除预期风险引致的正向劳动力流动、贸易、抚养率外,还包括城镇化率和Wagner法则。因此,我国贸易结构的转型与升级,应尤为重视贸易、预期风险引致的不同向劳动力再配置对政府实际支出的无谓消耗。     

发展中国家内、外资银行信贷行为差异分析

众多发展中国家的金融改革实践表明,银行业开放的正负效应并不具有显著的国别一般性,特别是在信贷稳定性上,在东道国和外资银行母国经济运行的不同时期,外资银行与东道国国内银行的信贷行为可能存在较大的差异性,进而对东道国的经济金融稳定带来不同的影响。本文从全球范围内抽取了21个发展中国家（地区）和转轨国家中的400余家内、外资银行为样本,以其在2002～2010年间的相关数据构成面板数据集,来对内、外资银行在此期间的信贷行为差异进行检验。研究发现,外资银行的信贷行为确实与国内银行存在着差异性,主要表现在外资银行的信贷增长既表现出与东道国的经济增长显著正相关,又明显受到母国经济状况的影响;在经济正常的年份里,外资银行的信贷表现更多的取决于东道国的经济状况,而当外资银行母国发生经济危机时,却会对外资银行的信贷增长造成较大的负向冲击。