How to reform China’s fiscal system?

ABSTRACT

As the population aging, China’s government expenditures, including general fiscal expenditure, healthcare and social security expenditure, will grow more rapidly than government revenues, tending to elevate government debt. Local governments undertake overwhelming 85% of total general fiscal revenue and are responsible for healthcare and social security, and their debt has been growing. Fiscal reforms are imperative, including tax reforms, the structure of government spending reforms, social security reforms, healthcare reforms, local public finance reforms, and central and local government’s fiscal relationship reforms. This paper will explore the fiscal challenges China faces and discuss how to reform the fiscal system to cope with these challenges.     

论传统外部性理论解决环境代际外部性的失效

代际外部性问题主要是人类代际之间行为的相互影响,尤其是前代对后代、当代对后代的影响。在解决代际外部性上,施害者、受害者和政府生活在不同的时空中,新古典方法几乎就无能为力。产权的界定是在产权主体存在的前提下进行的,所以产权在代际进行界定是不可能实现的,所以通过科斯定理来消除代际的外部性也行不通。     

改革地方公共管理的权利路径:巴西的经验

巴西的“公共管理与公民权”项目于1996年建立,其目的是发现和宣传由巴西次国家级政府在服务供给上的创新行为。这些创新时巴西的公民权建设产生了直接的影响。本文根据巴西的经验初步分析了从“权利”的路向改革公共管理,扩大其他机构和公民社会参与的可能性。     

论我国地方财政风险的个性特征

我国地方财政风险，不同于一般的财政风险。从整体考察，它具有分散性、非均衡性和传导性；从结构考察，具有隐蔽性、发展性和内生性，同时它又受外部因素的影响很大。     

Litigation, School Finance Reform, and Aggregate Educational Spending

In the past two decades, litigation in many U.S. stateshas triggered educational reform movements designed to reducethe inequalities in educational expenditures across school districts.This paper uses a panel data set across all the states from 1970–1990to examine the role of litigation and educational finance reformin determining the level of education funding in a flexible,dynamic setting. An important finding of our work is that litigationand reform have differential effects across the states, in somecases leading to increases while in other cases decreases inpredicted spending.     

中国地方政府债务权责划分:实践探索与改革建议

地方政府债务权责划分是一国分级财政体制的重要内容。实现中国地方政府债务的合法化已经成为解决当前地方政府债务问题的前提条件。地方政府债务的合法化不仅是债务融资权的界定问题,更是管理责任的归属问题。近年来中国某些地方已经开始自发地探索地方层面上的政府债务权责划分的方法。国家应尽快制定统一的法规,赋予地方政府合法举债权,但应严格控制债务规模、界定使用范围。应在财政部和省市县财政部门设立债务管理机构,明确地方政府的债务偿还及风险管理责任,加大债务监督力度。     

Incentives and Information Exchange in International Taxation

The exchange of taxpayer-specific information between national tax authorities has recently emerged as a key and controversial topic in international tax policy discussions, most notably with the OECD's harmful tax practices project and the EU's savings tax initiative. This paper analyzes the effects of information exchange and withholding taxes, recognizing that countries which agree to exchange information do not forfeit the ability to levy withholding taxes, and also focusing in particular on the effects of innovative revenue-sharing arrangements. Amongst the findings are that: (i) the transfer of withholding tax receipts to the residence country, as planned in the European Union, has no effect on equilibrium tax rates, but acts purely as a lump-sum transfer; (ii) in contrast, allocating some of the revenue from information exchange to the source country—counter to usual practice (though no less so than the EU agreement)—would have adverse strategic effects on total revenue; (iii) nevertheless, any withholding tax regime is Pareto dominated by information exchange combined with appropriate revenue sharing; and, in particular, (iv) sharing of the additional revenues raised from information provided, while efficiency-reducing, could be in the interests of large countries as a means of persuading small countries to provide that information voluntarily. JEL Code: H77, H87, F42     

Social housing in France: A permanent and multifaceted challenge for public policies

This paper examines the dynamics of the overwhelmingly generous social housing in France that covers a wide spectrum of recipients. Being influenced by electoral power of rotating ruling parties and social ideals, policy formulations are often reflected by idealistic politics which tends to over-stretch the nation’s budget and restrict its scope in reaching its target groups. From the 1990s, fund availability has been further hit by economic globalization causing falling business profitability and high unemployment rates affecting notably ethnic minorities. Upcoming social crisis has been met with public response via a series of technical-led remedial acts to promote social integration in housing and by identifying social ills and polarization in sensitive and problematic urban quarters. New technical and financial measures in coping with the complexity and magnitude of social housing are expected to remain highly challenging in the French parliamentary politics.     

Tourism and regional income inequality: Evidence from China

This study examines the role of tourism development in reducing regional income inequality in China. First, the theoretical foundation for how tourism affects regional income inequality is discussed. Second, based on the conditional convergence framework, this study proposes a spatiotemporal autoregressive model to capture spatial and temporal dependence as well as spatial heterogeneity. Tourism development is introduced as a conditional convergence factor in an attempt to examine whether the convergence speed is accelerated by regional tourism development. Third, the effects of international and domestic tourism in narrowing regional inequality are compared both globally and locally. The empirical results indicate that tourism development contributes significantly to the reduction of regional inequality, with domestic tourism making a greater contribution than international tourism.