地方政府财政风险:表现形式、成因与防范

财政是政府实现其职能的重要手段和经济基础.目前我国财政状况相当严峻,财政风险已逐渐凸现.与中央政府相比,我国地方政府运行困难更大,而与之相伴的财政风险的危害也更大,并且具有向上级传导风险的特性,从而有可能给国家公共财政体系带来各类风险.本文试图从我国地方财政风险的表现形式入手,探索其形成的深层原因,并提出了防范地方财政风险的制度、政策建议.     

中国政府间财政关系改革:地方视角

1994年的分税制改革,初步理顺了中央与各省级政府间的财政关系。体制运行十余年来,在取得巨大成效的背景下,暴露出以基层财政困难、地区间公共服务水平差异显著等为典型的现实问题。从地方视角而言,应以增强地方政府公共服务能力和均衡地方公共服务水平为基本出发点,逐步建立收入划分与支出划分相匹配的政府间财政关系安排。     

Political institutions and government spending behavior: theory and evidence from Iran

This study examines how the quality of political institutions affects the distribution of the government budget in Iran. We first introduce a mechanism through which democracy can shift government expenditure from national defense (military) to productivity-enhancing public spending (e.g., education). Using impulse response functions and a variance decomposition analysis on the basis of a vector autoregressive (VAR) model, our results imply that the response of military spending to an improvement (a deterioration) of democratic institutions is negative (positive) and statistically significant, whereas that of education spending is positive (negative) and significant. Our results are robust to other indicators of political institutions, different orderings of variables in the VAR, and alternative specifications of government spending categories.     

我国县乡财政解困的制度构建:经验借鉴与现实选择

造成我国县乡财政困难的原因很多.就制度方面而言,主要表现在我国政府财政层次过多,地方政府间事权与财政支出责任划分不明确,税收体系不健全以及转移支付制度的不完善.因此,可借鉴美国经验做到:减少政府财政级次,规范各级政府财力分配;以法律的形式明确界定各级政府事权与财政支出范围;完善税权划分和协调机制,确保基层财政收入;完善以公共服务均等化为目的的转移支付制度.     

地方政府债务管理及危机处置的国际经验借鉴

地方政府举债是工业化、城市化的必然选择,合理举债有利于地方财政的高效运转,但若监管错位、过度举债则有可能引发债务危机。自2014年起,我国赋予地方政府发债权,随着近年来收益类专项债的扩容,地方政府债务规模不断扩大,同时融资平台、政府引导基金等各种形式的隐性债务风险依然突出。当前地方政府债务风险被视为“灰犀牛”,亟需引起重视和关注。本文通过梳理美国、日本、巴西地方政府债务危机产生的原因和处置方式,总结国外地方政府债务管理和危机处置的有效经验,并结合现阶段我国地方政府债务管理中存在的预算软约束、发行主体单一、债务透明度差、评级和监管缺位、预警和处置机制不完善等主要问题,提出相关对策建议。     

财政分权与地方政府融资平台的发展:国外模式与中国之道

本文从财政分权的角度比较了中国和美日欧等发达经济体财权和事权的匹配度问题,并对各经济体地方政府融资渠道进行了归纳,分析了中国地方政府融资平台发展的历史沿革、特点和现状,介绍了主要商业银行的做法。最后从理论和现实的角度分析得出融资平台的产生具有历史必然性,其背后隐藏着一系列的政治经济体制问题,仅从金融机构防范化解信贷风险的角度入手无法从根本上解决融资平台的问题。     

浅谈我国地方财政风险的特点及其防范

地方财政风险是指地方财政在其运行过程中 ,由于不确定性因素的影响 ,发生财政资金损失或正常支出困难 ,导致政府机器难以正常运转、政府基本功能严重失调的可能性。目前 ,在我国一些地方 ,财政风险日渐显现 ,如何有效地对其加以防范和化解就成了一个值得关注的问题。本文拟从分析我国地方财政风险的特点入手对此做一些探讨     

Banking competition and economic growth: cross-country evidence

The aim of this paper is to analyse the effect of banking competition on industry economic growth using both structural measures of competition and measures based on the new empirical industrial organisation perspective. The evidence obtained in the period 1993–2003 for a sample of 53 sectors in 21 countries indicates that financial development promotes economic growth. The results also show that bank monopoly power has an inverted-U-shaped effect on economic growth, suggesting that bank market power has its highest growth effect at intermediate values. The latter result is consistent with the literature on relationship lending, which argues that bank competition can have a negative effect on the availability of finance for companies that are informationally more opaque.     

Local government amalgamation policy: A highway maintenance evaluation

Evaluating the effects of a change in public policy setting is a critical element in the chain of accountability. Factors such as effectiveness and efficiency in government operations are often difficult to measure. In this study of efficiency outcomes, we follow events before and after significant structural change arising from local authority amalgamation. The study focuses on highway maintenance and uses Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to evaluate whether greater efficiency was achieved. Results (confined to highway management activities) show no evidence that amalgamation was justified in terms of diseconomies arising from smallness (i.e. increasing returns to scale). While new governance practices introduced contemporaneously lifted the level of performance of local authorities in terms of higher technical efficiency, there is no evidence that the amalgamation policy contributed to this improvement. The policy impact evaluation methodology developed in this paper has potential for application to other local government service activities.     

Local fiscal distress and investment efficiency of local SOEs

In this paper, we use A-share listed firms between 2002 and 2010 to investigate the relationship between local fiscal distress and the investment efficiency of local SOEs, along with the effect of corporate tax payments on this relationship. We find a positive relationship between the extent of local SOEs' overinvestment and the fiscal distress of the corresponding local government where the enterprise and this relationship become stronger for firms that pay fewer taxes. The pattern of underinvestment among local SOEs was in contrast,and these relationships do not exist for non-SOEs or central SOEs. Moreover,we find that expanding a firm's investment scale leads to an increase in total taxes paid, including income and turnover taxes, which further result in more local fiscal revenue. Overall, we conclude that local governments have an incentive to increase fiscal revenue when faced with fiscal distress by raising the investment scale of local SOEs and that the incentives and effects of such interventions appear to be stronger among firms that contribute less to local fiscal revenue.ó 2013 Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of China Journal of Accounting Research. Founded by Sun Yat-sen University and City University of Hong Kong.     

债务限额、土地财政与地方政府隐性债务

隐性债务是新预算法实施后中国地方政府债务治理的重点和难点。本文通过构建一个关于地方政府行为的模型,探讨债务限额对地方政府隐性债务的影响。研究发现,为规避债务限额可能会导致地方政府隐性债务的增加,而增强财政透明度和审计力度有助于约束政府的预算外活动。本文还发现土地财政对地方政府投融资平台和政府与社会资本合作(PPP)两种不同的预算外融资方式的影响存在差异。利用2012-2017年间全国地级市层面的计量分析支持上述推论。     

我国财政风险分析:体制、效率、政策角度

财政运行困难是我国财政体制的一大痼疾，而与之相伴的财政风险危害更大。本试图从财政收入机制、财政支出效率、财政政策操作三个角度来分析形成我国财政风险的深层次原因，并提出了防范财政风险的政策、制度建议。     

对非税收入占地方财政收入比例过高格局的观察与思考

非税收入作为政府财政收入的组成部分,对支持国家经济发展具有重要作用。但是,通过对大连市非税收入规模和结构分析发现,大连市非税收入占地方财政收入比例超过50％,土地出让收入占非税收入比例七成左右,而且此种现象在沈阳、宁波、青岛等与大连经济发展情况相似的城市具有一定普遍性。非税收入占比过高的财政收入格局影响了财政收入质量,不利于地方经济的稳定增长和可持续发展,亟需从构建科学的税收制度体系、理顺政府收入分配秩序、规范政府筹资行为等深层次体制改革等方面人手进行深层次改革。     

财政刺激政策的难题

在国际金融危机的影响下,许多国家采取加大财政支出的政策促进经济复苏。但是,这些财政刺激政策在现实中却遇到了一些难题:居民边际消费倾向的偏低、大国内的地区差异,以及财政年度平衡制度的弊端等。由于这些难题的存在,单纯依靠增加财政支出规模促进经济复苏的刺激政策的实施效果充满了不确定性。     

地方政府行为与金融体系效率：以长三角经济区为例

本文在构建金融体系效率指标体系的基础上,衡量了长三角经济区的金融体系效率,并通过建立效率影响因素模型,分别分析了地方政府干预对金融体系动员效率和配置效率的影响。在此基础上,本文提出了规范地方政府行为、提高金融体系效率的政策建议。     

Balancing difficulty of performance targets: theory and evidence

We examine how firms balance difficulty of performance targets in their annual bonus plans. We present an analytical model showing that managerial allocation of effort is a function of not only relative incentive weights but also the difficulty of performance targets. We find that relative incentive weights and target difficulty can either be complements or substitutes in motivating effort depending on the extent to which managers have alternative employment opportunities. To test the predictions of our model, we use survey data on performance targets in annual bonus plans. Our sample of 877 survey respondents consists primarily of financial executives in small- and medium-size private companies where annual bonuses are important both for motivation and retention. Consistent with our model, we find that relative incentive weights are negatively (positively) associated with perceived target difficulty when concerns about managerial retention are high (low). It follows that performance measures included in annual bonus plans have sometimes easy and other times challenging targets depending on their relative incentive weights and retention concerns.     

Bond yield and credit rating: evidence of Chinese local government financing vehicles

Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting - Excessive borrowing of local governments in China sparked concerns that the debt may threaten the financial stability of the economy and ultimately...     

Central-local government fiscal relations and cyclicality of public spending: evidence from China

In this study, we analyze how fiscal decentralization affects the cyclicality of government spending. We focus on China, which experienced fiscal decentralization during 1979–1993 and then partly centralized its revenue with the 1994 fiscal reform. By employing both time series and province-level panel data, we show that Chinese provincial and total government spending was strongly procyclical during the decentralization period before the reform, but both became significantly less procyclical with respect to nationwide output fluctuations after the reform. We suggest several channels through which the procyclicality of subnational government spending in decentralized fiscal federations could be restrained. We further find that less procyclical provincial government spending is associated with smaller output volatility.     

The real impact of a one-off fiscal restriction: empirical evidence of a flypaper effect in Flemish municipalities

This paper analyses the effects of a one-off fiscal restriction on Flemish local government spending. The authors provide evidence of a ‘flypaper effect’: fiscal restriction stimulated the sensitivity of local spending to grants. This means that higher-level governments (regional/national/supranational) need to take a flypaper effect into account when considering one-off fiscal restrictions on lower-level governments.