土地财政区域差异研究综述

[目的]进一步揭示土地财政已存在的区域差异规律,为构建更为科学、切实可行的政策建议,推动"征地→批租"地方政府土地财政模式转型提供新的研究视角。[方法]文献资料方法和比较研究方法。[结果]现有研究证实了土地财政规模及依赖程度、财政收入激励下地方政府土地出让方式、土地财政推动经济增长、土地财政影响居民收入消费及公共品供给、土地财政与城市用地规模联动关系等方面,在全国范围内都存在东部、中部、西部的区域差异。国外保有环节的房地产税是地方政府持续的财政资金来源;同时,是促进房地产市场有序发展、抑制城市蔓延的有效政策工具。[结论]未来研究方向是以地市为单元,探明各类土地财政构成要素对于经济增长、居民收入与消费及产业服务化、城市公共品供给、城市各类用地规模增长的影响内在机理;构建区域差别化的保有环节房地产税征收管理政策方案。     

Trade Policy,Equipment Investment and Growth in India

The relationship between trade policy and economic performance is one of the oldest controversies in economic development. In this paper, we examine an alternative mechanism through which trade reforms may impact on economic growth to those commonly discussed in the literature. This mechanism builds on the link between equipment investment and growth that has been observed in cross-country data. We argue that that in countries which have had highly restrictive trade policies with respect to capital goods, liberalization measures that specifically target capital goods imports may bring about a fall in the relative price of capital goods, leading to an increase in the rate of investment in equipment. Quantifying the link between trade policy, equipment investment and economic growth in the Indian case, we find strong support for this mechanism.     

碳金融创新与“低碳扶贫”

本文首先总结了国际上已有的碳金融创新经验,分析了我国实现"低碳扶贫"所面临的机遇和挑战。综合考虑我国应对气候变化和减贫的要求,将应对气候变化和扶贫战略有机结合起来,构建了新的政策框架以促进政府、企业、农户、机构、个人等社会广泛参与的多元碳金融体系的建立。提出了保障贫困地区经济和环境持续协调发展的产业规划。     

Productivity growth and convergence in crop, ruminant, and nonruminant production: measurement and forecasts

Projections of future productivity growth rates in agriculture are an essential input for a great variety of tasks, ranging from development of an outlook for global commodity markets to the analysis of interactions between land use, deforestation, and ecological diversity. Yet solid projections for these variables have proven elusive—particularly on a global basis. This is due, in no small part, to the difficulty of measuring historical total factor productivity growth. Consequently, most productivity projections are based on partial factor productivity measures that can be quite misleading. The purpose of this work is to provide worldwide forecasts of agricultural productivity growth till the year 2040 based on the latest time series evidence on total factor productivity growth for crops, ruminants, and nonruminant livestock. The results suggest that most regions in the sample are likely to experience larger productivity gains in livestock than in crops. Within livestock, the nonruminant sector is expected to continue to be more dynamic than the ruminant sector. Given the rapid rates of productivity growth observed recently, nonruminant and crop productivity in developing countries may be converging to the productivity levels of developed countries. For ruminants, the results show that productivity levels in developing countries are likely to be diverging from those in developed countries.     

我国绿色金融存在的问题与对策

通过大量的数据收集,对不同时期的数据进行对比,总结出我国绿色金融目前的发展状况。根据目前的发展前景指出我国绿色金融发展中存在的缺陷,结合区块链等新技术和思路展望了绿色金融的未来发展方向,从提高参与度、监管资金流向和规范市场角度提出了解决相关问题的对策意见。     

Finance Constraints and Firm Transition in the Informal Sector: Evidence from Indian Manufacturing

This paper focuses on the role of finance constraints in determining the lack of transition of firms in India from very small family firms, which are the predominant type of firms in the informal sector, into larger informal firms that employ non-family labour. Using a rich firm-level data-set drawn from nationally representative surveys of the Indian informal manufacturing sector, this paper tests for the role played by finance constraints in firm transition in the informal sector at the firm and district level. There is evidence that the difficulty that firms face in accessing external finance acts as a significant constraint to small firm growth in the informal sector. Looking at data from India's districts, it is found that the financial development in a given district increases the likelihood that firms in the district will make the transition from household enterprises into non-household enterprises.     

Does individualization help productivity of transition agriculture?

There are large differences across transition countries with respect to agricultural‐sector performance and corresponding scope of farm restructuring and shift to individual farming. In this article we analyze the impact of individualization on productivity growth within an augmented neoclassical growth model framework. This approach allows us to circumvent criticisms on the grounds of lack of theoretical and objective criteria for inclusion of explanatory variables. Furthermore, in the empirical analysis using a panel data covering 15 transition countries over the period 1990–2001 and applying a generalized method of moments with instrumental variable estimator we are able to control for the impact of various factors and the potential endogeneity of variables. Our estimation results are robust and support the view that the shift to individual farming, as well as the overall economic reforms, has positively contributed to the productivity growth in agriculture during the first decade of transition.     

Developing country debt: implications for agricultural trade

There has been a sharp decline in the rate of economic growth in many developing countries in the 1980s compared with the 1970s. Reduced availability of external finance following the international debt crisis has been identified as one of the most important factors responsible for this decline. At the same time there has been a slowdown in the rate of growth of food imports to these countries, particularly to the highly indepted ones. The focus in the paper is on the implications for international agricultural commodity markets of a dept write-off in developing countries. To analyse these implications a world agricultural trade model is used. Specifically, the analysis covers the effect of existing debt on the permanent incomes of developing debtor countries and developed creditor countries, and hence the effect on agricultural commodity markets. The results indicate that, if the debts of the developing countries were written off, prices would improve in consequence of the resulting rise in their permanent incomes. If the debt write-off also led to growth in developing countries returning to the levels prevalent before the debt crisis, the improvements in world prices would be likely to be much larger.     

Why Don't Lenders Finance High-Return Technological Change in Developing-Country Agriculture?

Most of the literature attributes credit constraints in small-farm developing-country agriculture to the variability of returns to investment in this sector. But the literature does not fully explain lenders' reluctance to finance investments in technologies that provide both higher average and less variable returns. This article develops an information-theoretic credit market model with endogenous technology choice. The model demonstrates that lenders may refuse to finance any investment in a riskless high-return technology–regardless of the interest rate they are offered–when they are imperfectly informed about loan applicants' time preferences and, therefore, about their propensities to default intentionally in order to finance current consumption.     

The Internationalization of Firms From India: Investment,Mergers and Acquisitions

This paper analyses the rapid expansion in outflows of foreign direct investment from India and the spurt in foreign acquisitions by Indian firms, during the past decade, situated in the wider context of international investment from developing countries. Much of the investment was in manufacturing activities and most of the acquisitions were in industrialized countries. The economic stimulus and the strategic motive for the internationalization of firms from India were provided by a range of underlying factors driving the process, which differed across sectors and firms. The rapid growth in investment and acquisitions by Indian firms were partly attributable to factors implicit in the liberalization of the policy regime and the greater access to financial markets; but it must be recognized that Indian firms could not have become international without the capacity and the ability to compete in the world market. The attributes of Indian firms, which created such capacities and abilities, are embedded in the past and have emerged over a much longer period of time.     

Land expansion and growth in low‐ and middle‐income countries*

Over past decades, low and middle‐income countries have experienced considerable expansion of agricultural land, yet this effect on growth has not been examined The following paper shows that the Solow‐Swan growth model can be extended to the case whereby arable land is expanding, as originally suggested by Solow (1956). This extension indicates that land expansion boosts growth, and this effect increases with the relative share of land in income. An empirical analysis over 1990–2018 for 138 low and middle‐income countries supports this finding. The growth impact of land expansion over 1990–2018 varied significantly across the sample of countries depending on how much income was derived from land. This result explains why countries dependent on agriculture have engaged in extensive land expansion: it boosts overall growth. However, these growth benefits must be weighed against the considerable environmental costs of converting forests and other natural habitat to more agricultural land, such as increased carbon emissions, loss of ecosystem services and biodiversity, risk of disease, and impacts on local livelihoods.     

Intra-Country Health Inequalities and Air Pollution in Developing Countries

In the health economics literature, many studies have assessed the association between environmental degradation and health outcomes. This paper extends this literature by investigating how the presence of air pollution might explain health inequalities both between and within developing countries. We argue that differential exposure to air pollution between asset classes, differential ability to prevent the negative health effects of environment degradation, differential capacity to respond to disease caused by pollutants, and particular susceptibility of some groups to the effects of air pollution are all sufficient reasons for explaining a positive link between air pollution and asset-related health inequality. Using data from developing countries, our econometric results show that sulphur dioxide emissions (SO₂) and particulate matter (PM₁₀) partly explain the large disparities in infant and child mortalities between and within developing countries. In addition, we found that the institutions that are based on democratic principles, and which have low levels of corruption and high quality bureaucracy, are the most effective. That is, they are more responsive to the needs of the poor, they promote access to justice and public administration, and they deliver basic services to those most in need. As a result, they are able to more effectively mitigate the mortality effect of pollution for the poorest asset classes compared with that of the richest ones and thus reduce the health inequality it provokes.     

The incentives of China's urban land finance

Land grant premiums and land tax revenues have become two major sources of fiscal revenue for city governments in China. This type of fiscal revenue strategy for city governments is generally referred to as “land finance”, and it has drawn increasing research attention in recent years. This paper explores the institutional causes of the “land finance” strategy of city governments in China. We first analyze the institutional foundation of “land finance” (including China's urban land use system and land expropriation system). We then propose two hypotheses about the institutional causes of “land finance”. The first hypothesis is that the current system of fiscal decentralization is a major reason city governments choose the “land finance” fiscal strategy. The second hypothesis is that under the current personnel control system, which uses local economic performance as the most important indicator for evaluating local government officials, the competition between city governments to promote local economic growth is another major reason city governments choose the “land finance” fiscal strategy. We test the hypotheses by estimating econometric models using data for 31 provincial-level regions for the period 1999–2008. The empirical results suggest that fiscal decentralization and competition between city governments to promote economic growth are two major causes of “land finance”.     

Volatility,agricultural risk,and household poverty: micro‐evidence from randomized control trials

Households in developing countries are often highly exposed to risk and despite households’ risk strategies negative shocks often result in substantial welfare losses. Given the possibility that weather risks in particular might be further increasing, there is renewed policy attention on improving households’ risk management strategies. This article provides an overview of insights learned from recent randomized control trials on predictions coming out of the theoretical literature on households’ ex ante risk management. It reveals new puzzles and questions regarding households’ inter‐temporal decision making under risk, and draws lessons for effective policy design.     

Central versus local states: Which matters more in affecting China's urban growth?

To date, many geography studies have identified GDP, population, FDI, and transportation factors as key drivers of urban growth in China. The political science literature has demonstrated that China's urban growth is also driven by powerful economic and fiscal incentives for local governments, as well as by the political incentives of local leaders who control land use in their jurisdictions. These parallel but distinct research traditions limit a comprehensive understanding that can result in partial and potentially misleading conclusions of urbanization in China. This paper presents a spatially explicit study that incorporates both political science and geographic perspectives to understand the relative importance of hierarchal administrative governments in affecting urban growth. We use multi-level modeling approach to examine how socio-economic and policy factors – represented here by fiscal transfers – at different administrative levels affect growth in “urban hotspot counties” across three time periods (1995–2000, 2000–2005, and 2005–2008). Our results show that counties that are more dependent on fiscal transfers from the central government convert less cultivated land to urban use, controlling for other factors. We also find that local governments are becoming more powerful in shaping urban land development as a result of local economic, fiscal, and political incentives, as well as through the practical management and control of capital, land, and human resources. By incorporating fiscal transfers in our analysis, our study examines a factor in the urban development of China that had previously been neglected and provides an improved understanding of the underlying processes and pathways involved in urban growth in China.     

Productivity change in Taiwan's farmers' credit unions: a nonparametric risk-adjusted Malmquist approach

This article proposes an extended three‐stage DEA methodology similar to Fried et al. (2002) to improve the measurement of productivity growth when the assumption of free disposability of undesirable output does not apply. A directional distance function is used to construct adjusted Malmquist–Luenberger productivity indexes which simultaneously account for the impacts of undesirable outputs, environmental variables, and statistical noise. Panel data for 263 farmers' credit unions (FCUs) in Taiwan covering the 1998–2000 periods are employed to illustrate the advantages of this method. On average, the productivity of Taiwan's FCUs is found to have deteriorated over the 1998–2000 period. Although an improvement in efficiency has been observed, the major reason for the deterioration is found to be due to the regression of technology.     

Growth of milk production in German dairy farms: an empirical study based on event history analysis

This article investigates determinants of growth of milk production in German dairy farms with the use of event history analysis. This methodology enables the analysts to consider time as a proxy for not measurable effects on growth. The likelihood of a farm's moving from a nongrowth episode into a growth episode is estimated and the impact of various covariates on that likelihood is assessed. The analysis is based upon a balanced panel of annual farm accounts from 616 specialized dairy farms in Germany, covering the financial years 1995/1996–2008/2009. The results from event history analyses are presented for low and high growth rates. For both groups, it was found that the probability of entering a growth episode, defined as the event to be analyzed, increases over time, e.g., as a consequence of an increasing need to improve competitiveness. Moreover, several covariates, such as the share of subsidies in returns, farmer's age, and milk price, had a significant impact on growth in a farm's milk production. The analysis revealed, however, that the effect‐direction of some explanatory variables differed between the two groups.     

Agricultural productivity growth in Latin America and the Caribbean: an analysis of climatic effects,catch‐up and convergence*

This paper investigates whether climatic adjusted total factor productivity (CATFP) in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) is converging, converging to different steady states or exhibit absolute convergence, that is the process does not require (government) interventions to reach its equilibrium path. We use data from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit and from the Food and Agriculture Organization for 28 LAC countries over a 54‐year period (1961–2014) to estimate random parameters stochastic production frontier models to calculate CATFP and then use cross‐sectional regressions and an error correction model to analyse CATFP convergence across countries in the region. The results show that technological progress is the main driver of CATFP growth in the region and there is no absolute convergence, that is CATFP gaps across countries will not decrease over time and least performing countries will not grow faster than better performing ones without targeted policies. However, CATFP across LAC exhibits conditional convergence towards different steady states. Technological progress plays a critical role in raising the steady state level of CATFP with an overall average of 2.22 per cent per annum.     

Effects of land urbanization and land finance on carbon emissions: A panel data analysis for Chinese provinces

The rapid urbanization in China comes with several economic, social, and environmental issues, most of which are related to land use. This study contributes to research on the land–growth–environment nexus by investigating the effect of land urbanization and land finance on carbon emissions in China from 2004 to 2013 using the Stochastic Impacts by Regression on Population, Affluence, and Technology (STIRPAT) model. Results show that land finance and land urbanization significantly affect carbon emissions. The rate of land urbanization contributes to the reduction of carbon emissions; however, it has less impact compared with other determinants. The effect of land finance and land urbanization on carbon emissions indicates that a local government’s willingness to lease land for revenue aggravates carbon emissions. Economic growth and industrial structure also influence carbon emissions. Furthermore, the land requisition system and rural land conversion market should be enhanced through the guidance provided by the 13th Five-Year Plan (2016–2020) to promote the diversification of land transfer, fully consider regional differences, and establish a distinct policy focus that can contribute to emission reduction and land use.