财政竞争、地方政府政策选择与经济增长——基于中国省际面板数据的实证研究

分税制背景下财政分权体制使得地方政府之间存在着激烈的财政竞争,其典型特征表现为税负、公共投入支出和公共服务支出三种政策工具之间的策略互动,从而影响各地区的经济增长。基于1997～2009年中国省级面板数据,通过估计交互项系数的符号,结果发现:地方政府的三种政策工具是相辅相成的;交互项的作用也存在着地区的差异;税负、公共服务支出和公共投入支出对经济增长有着不同的边际影响。     

分税与地方财政支出结构

本文研究了税收分成对地方财政支出结构的影响。理论分析发现,在地方政府的财政支出结构竞争中,税收分成比例的提高将直接导致地方政府增加生产性公共支出,发挥生产性支出的产出外部性,提高产出水平和自身税收收入水平,实现福利最大化。一系列经验分析显著地验证了上述结论,即当地级市政府的税收分成率提高10%,该地区生产性支出占比将提高1.39%。本文的分析和结论有助于解释中国地方财政支出结构变动的原因,从而为政府间税收分配改革提供有效的政策建议。     

Voters prefer more qualified mayors,but does it matter for public finances? Evidence for Germany

This paper studies the importance of politicians’ qualification, in terms of education and experience, for fiscal outcomes. The analysis is based on a large panel for 2031 German municipalities for which we have collected information on municipal budgets as well as the election results and qualification levels of mayoral candidates. We principally use a regression discontinuity design focusing on close elections to estimate causal effects. We find that mayors with prior experience in office have a tendency to reduce the level of local public debt, lower total municipal expenditures and decrease the local taxes, even though these results are only significant in some specifications. In contrast, the education level of the mayor exerts no significant effects on the overall fiscal performance of the municipality. The results are partly surprising as both education and experience are shown to matter greatly in the electoral success of mayoral candidates.     

Information sharing,neighborhood demarcation,and yardstick competition: an empirical analysis of intergovernmental expenditure interaction in Japan

The Japanese government provides information on local fiscal performance through the Fiscal Index Tables for Similar Municipalities (FITS-M). The FITS-M categorize municipalities into groups of “similar localities” and provide them with the fiscal indices of their group members, enabling municipalities to use the tables to identify their “neighbors” (i.e., those in the same FITS-M group) and refer to their fiscal information as a “yardstick” for fiscal planning. We take advantage of this system to estimate municipal spending function. In particular, we examine whether the FITS-M help identify a defensible spatial weights matrix that properly describes municipal spending interactions. Our analysis shows that they do. In particular, geographical proximity is significant only between a pair of municipalities within a given FITS-M group, and it does not affect competition between pairs belonging to different groups even if they are located close to each other. This would suggest that the FITS-M work as intended, indicating that spending interaction among Japanese municipalities originates from yardstick competition and not from other types of fiscal competition.     

Taxation without representation: local fiscal response to intergovernmental transfers in China

This paper studies the effects of intergovernmental transfers on local public spending in China, an authoritarian country where local politicians are not largely accountable to residents. The identification exploits a discontinuity from the central government’s designation of National Poor Counties. We find that additional transfers to county governments increase local public spending one-for-one. We further confirm that counties receiving additional transfers do not reduce the effective tax burden borne by firms. The results echo the empirical anomaly of the flypaper effect found in developed economies under democratic governments.     

Long‐Term Effects of Fiscal Policy on the Size and Distribution of the Pie in the UK*

This paper provides a joint analysis of the output and distributional long‐term effects of various fiscal policies in the UK, using a vector autoregression (VAR) approach. Our findings suggest that the long‐term impact on GDP of increasing public spending and taxes is negative, and especially strong in the case of current expenditure. We also find significant distributional effects associated with fiscal policies, indicating that an increase in public spending reduces inequality while a rise in indirect taxes increases income inequality.     

The association of departures from spending rate equilibrium to municipal borrowing cost

The U.S. municipal bond market has grown dramatically in recent decades. Debt financing has become a more important source of capital for municipalities, yet research into the association of fiscal management and borrowing cost has not been directly addressed since before GASB's formation in 1984. We attempt to fill this void and contribute to the dialog concerning municipal managerial competence and its association with borrowing cost by studying a sample of 3285 county general obligation bonds over a 13-year period. We resolve conflicting and counterintuitive results in prior work and demonstrate that the lowest borrowing cost is achieved where general fund revenues equal general fund expenditures (i.e., equilibrium spending rate). Further, we find that the association between spending rate and borrowing cost is nonmonotonic, nonlinear, and asymmetric. We demonstrate that maintenance of a spending rate equilibrium point may be a way of achieving minimum borrowing cost. In the context of fiscal constraints and the increased reliance on credit markets by municipalities, managing to the spending rate equilibrium may reduce the borrowing costs of providing municipal services.     

Infrastructure spillovers and strategic interaction: does the size matter?

We set up a model in which the residents of two neighboring municipalities use the services provided by public infrastructures located in both jurisdictions. The outcome is that municipalities strategically interact when investing in infrastructures, with the small municipality reacting more to the expenditure of its neighbor than the big one. This theoretical prediction is tested by estimating the determinants of the stock of public infrastructures of the municipalities belonging to the Autonomous Province of Trento in Italy. By introducing the classical spatial lag-error component, we find that municipalities positively react to an increase in infrastructures by their neighbors, but the effect vanishes above a given population threshold. Such a result is confirmed when we exploit the exogenous variation in the neighbors’ stock of infrastructures induced by a strong flood that occurred in the Province of Trento in 2000.     

Public education spending in a globalized world:

This paper studies the effect of globalization on public expenditures allocated to different stages of education. First, we derive theoretically that globalization’s influence on education expenditures depends on the type of government. For benevolent governments, the model suggests that expenditures for higher education will increase and expenditures for basic education will decline with deepening economic integration. For Leviathan governments, on the other hand, the effects of globalization on public education spending cannot be unambiguously predicted. In the second part of the paper, we empirically analyze globalization’s influence on primary, secondary, and tertiary education expenditures with panel data covering 104 countries over the 1992–2006 period. The results indicate that globalization has led in both industrialized and developing countries to more spending for secondary and tertiary and to less spending for primary education.     

Fiscal incentives and political budget cycles in China

Political budget cycles in democracies have been extensively analyzed, but few studies of non-democracies exist. This paper explores political budget cycles in China’s provinces. Using data from Chinese provinces from 1980 to 2006, the analysis finds that the effects of a provincial leader’s tenure on political budget cycles are minimal, implying a weak causal relationship between spending composition and a politician’s time in office at the provincial level. However, there exists a national coordinated cycle associated with the timing of the National Congress of the Communist Party (NCCP). Two years prior to the NCCP, politicians are likely to shift public spending toward capital expenditures, such as innovation funds and capital construction, and away from current expenditures, such as agricultural subsidies. The opposite pattern occurs during the year of the NCCP, when politicians increase current expenditures, such as social expenditures and government administration, and decrease capital expenditures. The increased capital expenditures 2 years prior to the NCCP are accompanied by an increase in taxation and total aggregate spending. The empirical results indicate that provincial budget cycles are mainly driven by national policies rather than by provincial leaders’ personal career incentives. Chinese leaders’ fiscal behaviors are constrained by the dynamics of the national leadership transition, resulting in similar distortions to those found in the democratic countries.     

Expenditure Reform in Industrialised Countries: A Case‐Study Approach*

This study examines reforms of public expenditure in industrialised countries over the past two decades. We distinguish ambitious and timid reformers and analyse in detail reform experiences in eight case studies of ambitious reform episodes. We find that ambitious reform countries reduce spending on transfers, subsidies and public consumption. Such expenditure retrenchment is also typically part of a comprehensive reform package that includes improvements in fiscal institutions as well as structural and other macroeconomic reforms. The study finds that ambitious expenditure retrenchment and reform coincides with large improvements in fiscal and economic growth indicators.     

财政支出对湖南经济收敛的效应研究

运用新古典经济学的收敛模型,通过检验1994～2008年财政支出对湖南经济发展的收敛模型发现,财政支出总额促进了经济的收敛,教育支出、支援农业生产支出、基本建设支出、行政管理费也不同程度地促进了经济的收敛.     

我国省域民生财政支出均衡性研究

利用公开年鉴数据,对民生支出基尼系数进行结构分解,考察2007～2010年间我国省域民生财政支出的均衡性,以及各项民生支出对总体民生支出均衡性的影响。研究发现,几年来民生财政支出的地区均衡性有所提高,但是结构性问题值得关注。     

How big (small?) are fiscal multipliers?

Contributing to the debate on the macroeconomic effects of fiscal stimuli, we show that the impact of government expenditure shocks depends crucially on key country characteristics, such as the level of development, exchange rate regime, openness to trade, and public indebtedness. Based on a novel quarterly dataset of government expenditure in 44 countries, we find that (i) the output effect of an increase in government consumption is larger in industrial than in developing countries; (ii) the fiscal multiplier is relatively large in economies operating under predetermined exchange rates but is zero in economies operating under flexible exchange rates; (iii) fiscal multipliers in open economies are smaller than in closed economies; (iv) fiscal multipliers in high-debt countries are negative.     

Macro‐Fiscal Volatility and the Composition of Public Spending*

Earlier empirical literature has examined some long‐ and medium‐term aspects of macro‐fiscal volatility while leaving its short‐term fiscal impact unexplored. To help fill that gap, we examine the impact of macro‐fiscal volatility on the composition of public spending. To that end, we analyse a panel of 10 EU countries during 1991–2007. Our results suggest that increases in the volatility of regularly‐collected and cyclical revenues such as the VAT and income taxes tend to tilt the expenditure composition in favour of public investment. In contrast, increases in the volatility of ad hoc taxes such as capital taxes tend to favour public consumption spending, albeit only a little. We interpret such volatility innovations as conveying news to the fiscal policymaker about the underlying economic conditions, with especially regularly‐collected and cyclical taxes prompting short‐term cyclical fine‐tuning.     

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.     

Private Equity and Local Public Finances

We study the economic impact of private equity (PE) investments on local governments, which are important corporate stakeholders. Examining over 11,000 deals and private firm data in Europe, we document that target firms' effective tax rates and total tax expenses decrease by 15% and 13% after PE deals. At the same time, target firms expand their capital expenditures and firm boundaries, but do not increase employment. Using administrative data on the public finances of German municipalities and exploiting the geographical and time-series variation in PE deals, we document that PE activity is negatively associated with local governments' tax revenues and spending. This result is likely driven by reduced tax payments of PE portfolio firms, accompanied by only modest positive spillovers of PE investments on regional economic growth. Collectively, our findings suggest that corporate tax efficiency serves as a cost-cutting channel in the PE sector and constrains the finances of local governments.     

Immigration and local spending in social services: evidence from a massive immigration wave

The aim of this paper is to analyze the relationship between immigration and redistributive public spending by using the recent, massive arrival of immigrants in Spain. Specifically, we focus our analysis on the effect of 1998–2006 changes in local immigrant density on contemporaneous changes in municipal spending in social services. To address the potential endogenous location of immigrants, we adopt an instrumental variables approach that uses the distribution of rental housing in 1991 to predict the location of immigrant inflows. The results indicate that (per capita) social spending increased less in those municipalities that recorded the largest increases in immigrant density. We interpret our results as a reduction in natives’ demand for redistributive public spending.     

The Government Spending Multiplier in Turkey

This study aims to measure the size of the government spending multiplier in Turkey for post-2001 financial crisis period within a structural VAR framework. The analysis demonstrates that a positive shock to government spending tends to increase output, tax, and real interest rate on impact and the size of the fiscal multiplier is relatively large at first few quarters. The fiscal multiplier reaches a peak value of 1.5 at second quarter and then starts to diminish. Furthermore, investigating the effects of the components of government spending reveals the fact that government investment expenditures, rather than consumption expenditures, have a profound impact on output at first few quarters.     

我国地方政府间财政支出竞争的动因分析

地方政府在发展经济的过程中,由于行政区域的独立性使得地方政府之间表现出经济总量的竞争。而这种竞争需要工具手段,从而进一步表现为发挥财政功能的税收竞争和财政支出竞争。其中对于税收竞争,已经有了较多的论述,而对于财政支出竞争,在很多方面还是一个新问题。并且这种竞争在成为地方政府发展经济的重要外部动力时,也出现了多方面的问题。为此,本文探讨了财政支出竞争产生的动因,以期为后期解决财政支出竞争所带来的问题更加具有针对性。