中国财政竞争与地方公共支出结构分析

This article examines the impact of intergovernmental fiscal competition on local public expenditure in China under current performance assessment system in which GDP is a critical factor. First, we present the assignment of public goods and tax burden and the share of foreign direct investment (FDI) of 30 provinces, and we find that current fiscal competition in China has taken the form of public expenditure improvement accompanied by preferential tax policies. Second, we regress the share of FDI on different components of provincial public expenditure, and find that the share of FDI is correlated negatively with the public service, tax burden and health care service while positively with infrastructure development. Therefore, FDI-based infrastructural investment crowds out public services investment, which fails to support the view that fiscal competition improves social welfares.     

Aggregate infrastructure capital stock and long-run growth: Evidence from Finnish data

In this paper, Bayesian methods and the Finnish aggregate infrastructure capital series from 1860 to 2003 are used to explore how government infrastructure policy affects long-run output growth. We use Finnish data, since to the best of our knowledge the Finnish land and water construction investments series is the best available sufficiently long time series on aggregate infrastructure investments. The Finnish data provide strong and robust evidence indicating that permanent changes in government infrastructure policy have permanent effects on the growth rate of output.     

Property values,local public expenditure and economic efficiency

A bid-rent model of property value determination with a public good and property taxation is developed. Using the local government budget constraint, an estimating equation is derived which can indicate whether public goods are efficiently provided. The empirical results show over-provision of public goods in northeastern New Jersey.     

Inflation targeting and the composition of public expenditure: Evidence from developing countries

An important literature shows that inflation targeting (IT) adoption improves fiscal discipline. Our impact assessment analysis performed in a large sample of 89 developing countries over three decades shows that this favorable impact covers a composition effect: IT adoption is found to reduce more current expenditure compared with public investment in IT countries relative to non-IT countries. This finding is robust to various alternative specification, related to the structure of the sample, the measurement of the IT regime, or the estimation method. Consequently, aside from its acknowledged benefits for monetary policy goals, IT appears as an efficient tool to strengthen fiscal policy in developing countries towards lower and more productive public expenditure.     

Natural resource windfalls and efficiency in local government expenditure: Evidence from Peru

We study the role of natural resource windfalls in explaining the technical efficiency of public expenditure. Using a rich dataset of expenditure and public good provision for 1836 municipalities in Peru for the period 2001–2010, we estimate a nonmonotonic relationship between the efficiency of public good provision and the level of natural resource transfers. Local governments that were extremely favored by the boom in mineral prices were more efficient in using fiscal windfalls, whereas those that only benefited from modest transfers were more inefficient. These results can be explained by the increase in political competition associated with the boom. However, the fact that increases in efficiency were related to reductions in public good provision casts doubts on the beneficial effects of political competition in promoting efficiency.     

Chinese investment in Australian infrastructure assets: accounting for local public preferences

Chinese investment in Australian infrastructure assets can bring economic benefits for both countries. However, it can also create domestic political challenges. This is because Australian public support for foreign investment in infrastructure is limited. In order to better inform public policy and firm decision-making in both China and Australia, this paper undertakes a choice modelling analysis of original survey data to determine the drivers of local public preferences. The Australian public is found to be more concerned by the share of foreign ownership an investment will bring rather than the fact it is from China. Accounting for these preferences, such as through the recruitment of local partner companies, will facilitate Chinese investment in Australian infrastructure, and potentially, greater bilateral engagement on the Belt and Road Initiative. The Australian case might also offer wider lessons for Chinese investment in infrastructure assets abroad.     

Technology innovation and entrepreneurial state: the development of China's high-speed rail industry

China proactively promotes indigenous technology innovation towards developing an innovation-based economy. This contradicts the developmental state literature that puts emphasis on technology imitation. Drawn from the strategic entrepreneurship perspective, this article explores the role of the government in China's technology innovation process. Carrying out a case study in the high-speed rail (HSR) industry, it suggests that it is best to understand the Chinese government as an entrepreneur in moving China's HSR industry towards technology innovation-driven development, through three dimensions of state-led strategic entrepreneurship: alertness to opportunities, resource exploration and consolidation, and strategic learning. This article highlights the importance of strategic entrepreneurship to the government in an emerging economy context and contributes to the literature by building a conceptual framework of ‘entrepreneurial state’.     

Non-linear budgetary policies: Evidence from 150 years of Italian public finance

We investigate the sustainability of Italy’s public finances from 1862 to 2012 adopting a non-linear perspective. Specifically, we employ the smooth transition regression approach to explore the scope for non-linear fiscal adjustments of primary surpluses in response to the accumulation of debt. The empirical results show the occurrence of a significantly positive reaction of primary surpluses to debt when the debt–GDP ratio exceeded the trigger value of 110 percent. The after-threshold positive response implies that the path of Italy’s fiscal policy is sufficiently consistent with the intertemporal budget constraint.     

Political expenditure cycles and election outcomes: Evidence from disaggregation of public expenditures by economic functions

We analyze electorally motivated public spending using disaggregated expenditure data. Election cycles in total expenditures and in specific sub-categories mainly exist in newly democratized Eastern European countries. However, electorally motivated spending policies are ineffective means to enhance the re-election probability.     

Ownership, institutions, and capital structure: Evidence from China

We employ a unique data set to explore the role of ownership structure and institutional development in debt financing of non-publicly traded Chinese firms. We show that state ownership is positively associated with leverage and firms’ access to long-term debt, while foreign ownership is negatively associated with all measures of leverage. Surprisingly, firms in better developed regions are associated with reduced access to long-term debt, suggesting the availability of alternative financing channels and the tightening of the lending standards under the on-going banking reform. The combination of ownership structures and institutions explains up to 6% of the total variation in firms’ leverage decisions, while firm characteristics alone explain no more than 8% of the variation. Further, we show that non-state-owned firms tend to have lower total and short-term debt than their state-owned counterparts in less developed regions. Finally, we show that state-owned firms’ easy access to long-term debt is positively associated with long-term investment and negatively associated with firm performance.     

Social capital, innovation and growth: Evidence from Europe

This paper investigates the interplay between social capital, innovation and per capita income growth in the European Union. We model and identify innovation as an important mechanism that transforms social capital into higher income levels. In an empirical investigation of 102 European regions in the period 1990-2002, we show that higher innovation performance is conducive to per capita income growth and that social capital affects this growth indirectly by fostering innovation. Our estimates suggest that there is no direct role for social capital to foster per capita income growth in our sample of European Union countries.     

交通基础设施、空间溢出与经济增长:来自中国的实证研究

This paper develops an empirical model to test the spatial spillover effects of transport infrastructure on economic growth. It uses spatial econometric techniques and provincial panel data of China from 1993 to 2004 to analyze the contribution of transport infrastructure to the economic growth of local province and its spatial spillover effects on the economic growth of other provinces. The main findings include: (1) Transport infrastructure and economic growth of China show an evident pattern of spatial clustering. They largely congregate in developed eastern coastal regions, forming a gradient gradually diminishing from east to west. (2) Output elasticity of local transport infrastructure is 0.106, between the values calculated by early researchers with time series data and panel data. (3) Spatial output spillovers from transport infrastructure are largely positive, but evidences of negative spatial spillovers are also found with population density spatial weights matrix model.      

The effect of female representation on political budget cycle and public expenditure: Evidence from Italian municipalities

This study analyzes the impact of the gender composition of political institutions on the political budget cycle (PBC) and on the size and structure of public expenditure. An instrumental variable approach is implemented to evaluate the influence of female politicians in municipal councils. The introduction of gender quotas for Italian municipalities is used as an exogenous variation in female participation in politics. The results show that: (i) fluctuations in local public spending are only slightly affected by the presence of a wider female representation; (ii) an increase in the number of elected women reduces the overall amount of public expenditure; (iii) this reduction involves fields typically affected by PBC (e.g., roads' maintenance) except those related to females' needs (e.g., kindergarten, primary education, and social care).     

国内价值链与区域经济周期协同:来自中国的经验证据

本文采用2002年、2007年和2010年中国30个省区区域间投入产出表,就国内价值链对区域经济周期协同性的影响进行了全方位考察。结果表明,国内价值链贸易增强了中国地区间经济周期的联动性,而在控制国内价值链贸易之后,区际贸易却降低了两地区产出的协同程度,区际贸易具有的Frankel-Rose效应主要是国内价值链贸易的作用结果。在引入省区官员交流等工具变量控制内生性后,结果仍是稳健的。同时,国内价值链贸易的传导效应不仅受价值链分工地位差异的影响,而且呈现出显著的危机前后时段特征和东部与中西部内外空间特征。进一步纳入全球价值链后发现,全球价值链贸易对国内价值链贸易的正向经济周期协同效应具有放大作用,而传统国际贸易对传统区际贸易的负向经济周期冲击存在叠加效应,国内价值链联结的区际分工网络是保证中国经济外向型发展过程中各地区之间经济紧密联动、协同共进的重要力量。     

Tax perceptions and the demand for public expenditure: evidence from UK micro-data

Using responses from the 1995 British Social Attitudes Survey (BSAS), this paper assesses if there is evidence of voter misperception of tax costs. We find convincing evidence of income tax (IT) and value added tax (VAT) misperceptions, with a systematic bias towards overestimation of tax burdens for VAT, contrary to predictions of the fiscal illusion literature. We then integrate tax misperceptions into a model of demand for public expenditure. Voters' spending preferences are strongly related to their incomes, actual tax costs, and other fiscal-related household characteristics. A tendency to overestimate tax burdens appears to have only a modest influence on demands for public spending.     

Human capital formation and public debt: growth and welfare effects of three different deficit policies

We analyze an endogenous growth model public educational spending. We show that the balanced budget policy and the policy with a slight deficit yield higher growth than a debt policy where public debt grows at the same rate as GDP, unless the government is a creditor. As concerns welfare, it can be demonstrated that a strong deficit policy yields lower welfare than a balanced budget and a slight deficit policy, unless initial debt ratios are low and the intertemporal elasticity of substitution is high. Finally, there may exist an inverted U-shaped relation between welfare and deficit-financed educational spending.     

Privatization, water access and affordability: Evidence from Malaysian household expenditure data

The aim of this paper is to examine empirically the impact of privatization on water access and affordability in Malaysia using household expenditure data. The development of water sector in Malaysia in terms of coverage has been fairly uneven. Some states have privatized their water supply sector while others have not. The overall finding of this study is that the impact of privatization on access and affordability in the Malaysian water supply sector is ambiguous. Privatization does not seem to have improved access to treated water from network in Malaysia. A likely explanation of this is the role played by the government in the sector in terms of tariff regulation and universal service provision. Furthermore, privatization does not seem to have adversely affected affordability in the sector. In addition to political intervention in tariff regulation, this could be due to the government maintaining a significant stake in privatized water companies.     

Growth effects of public expenditure on the state and local level: evidence from a sample of rich governments

There is a vast empirical literature investigating the relationship between government size and economic growth. But the empirical evidence of growth effects of public expenditure using cross-country regressions is still inconclusive. According to a number of authors this is not surprising since the negative relationship only applies for rich countries with a large public sector. Restricting their analysis on rich countries only they can show the predicted negative impact. Naturally, a selection of a sub-sample of rich countries is always somewhat arbitrary. Another possibility is to concentrate on governments within a rich country. However, only few studies investigate the effect of state and local spending on economic growth. This study concentrates on the relationship between public expenditure and economic growth within a rich country using the full sample of state and local governments from Switzerland over the 1981–2001 period. The general finding is a fairly robust negative relationship between government size and economic growth. However, in contrast to public spending from operating budgets there is no significant impact on economic growth by expenditure from capital budgets.     

Assessing the contribution of public capital to private production: Evidence from the German manufacturing sector

Using time-series cross-section data from the manufacturing sector of the 11 West German 'Bundesländer' (Federal States) from 1970 to 1996, I examine the impact of public capital on private production. My econometric analysis explicitly takes into account four of the most frequent specification issues in the context of time-series crosssection data analysis: serial correlation, groupwise heteroscedasticity, cross-sectional correlation and non-stationarity of data. For all approaches and tested specifications, I find that public capital is a significant input for production in the manufacturing sector. Moreover, I find that differences in public capital endowment can explain long-term differences in productivity across the Bundesländer. One tentative conclusion that can be drawn from this finding is that differences in public capital endowment might also explain a part of the still-existing productivity gap between manufacturing in East and West Germany. However, I emphasise that the existence of positive effects of public capital on private production is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition for concluding that public investments should be boosted in the future.