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.     

Externalities of R&D Expenditures

Innovation is generally recognized as a major source of economic growth. R&D investments explicitly aim at generating innovations and creating knowledge. Since knowledge has certain public good properties, positive externalities are likely to exist. In this paper, we extend well-known concepts from the input-output literature (backward multipliers) to indicate at which commodities stimuli should be targeted to enhance R&D and its positive externalities in the economy as a whole. Next, we argue that there may also be negative externalities of R&D, due to increased prices. This issue can be studied by means of forward multipliers. Both concepts are applied to the United States, 1977-90.     

State competition in higher education: A race to the top,or a race to the bottom?

How does competition affect higher education? This paper explores this question for public and private universities. Theory indicates that competition can push higher education policy in one of two different directions. On the one hand, competition may increase spending. For states, this would occur if states treat higher education as developmental; for private universities this would occur if they view spending as a means to attract students and prestige. On the other hand, competition may decrease spending if states treat higher education spending as redistributive, and competition may decrease spending by private schools if lower spending enhances their ability to attract students with low tuition. To determine which of these perspectives is most valid, we examine higher education policy choices in the 1980s and 1990s. We find that states appear to act as if higher education funding is redistributive while private schools appear to compete more on the basis of tuition than spending. These results demonstrate the important effects competition and governance structure have on higher education.Received: August 2001, Accepted: May 2002, JEL Classification: I2, I22, H72, I3     

中国式"荷兰病"影响中国财政收支格局的实证分析

中国式荷兰病来源于中国入世后外向型劳动力密集型产业的空前繁荣。本文从实证角度分析了中国式荷兰病通过体制惰性效应对中国财政收支体制与财政收支政策的诸多影响。研究发现,在中国整体财政能力增强和财政收支状况改善的同时,不仅我国外债结构、中央与地方财政关系明显恶化,而且社会财富加速向公共部门集中,国富民穷现象突出,经济增长方式转变受到较大制约。文章最后建议及时对个人、企业进行实质性减税,积极扩大政府公共服务范围及领域,增加环境保护、社会保障、医疗卫生、教育、科学技术以及农业的财政支出比重,进一步规范中央与地方政府的财政税收权利与义务,从而确保中国经济健康、稳定与可持续发展。     

Increasing school quantity versus quality in kenya: impact on children from low-and high-income households

A common dilemma facing educational planners engaged in educational reform in developing countries is the allocation of sharply-reduced resources to the expansion of school facilities versus improvement of existing school facilities (say, by raising the teacher/pupil ratio). The empirical results presented in this paper for Kenya suggest that the two interventions have diametrically opposite effects on poor and nonpoor children. An expansion of school facilities increases the enrollment of children in the poorest expenditure quintiles but has no impact on the enrollment of children in the top quintiles. On the other hand, an improvement in the teacher-pupil ratio increases the enrollment rate of children in the top quintiles, and actually reduces the enrollment of children in the poor quintiles. These findings suggest that in situations where there is less than universal primary enrollment (UPE) and the government has set a time-bound goal of UPE, such as in Kenya, policies that serve to expand the number of school facilities may make more sense than interventions that increase the teacher-pupil ratio.     

公共支出结构变动影响经济增长的定量分析

基于公共支出增长理论,具体研究了改革开放以来,我国公共财政支出的总量、比重及结构变化对经济增长的定量影响,揭示了各项公共支出比重的变化导致了公共支出产出弹性的变化,从而对经济增长的作用大小也发生变化.     

我国现阶段财政支出与财政收入政策间的结构特征分析

本文考察了现阶段我国财政收入与财政支出政策相互间结构关系特征。我国长期以来采取扩张性的财政支出政策,同时财政收入政策相对从紧。财政收入绝对增长的同时,占GDP比重持续上升。在采取了一系列减税政策的同时,企业赋税压力并未减弱。地方政府普遍财政支出大于一般预算收入,中央转移支付力度不断加大,地方政府本身平衡预算的能力和责任在制度上缺乏可能等等,都构成我国财政政策效应的特点,都需要深入讨论。     

Lessons learned from the national household food acquisition and purchase survey in the United States

The National Household Food Acquisition and Purchase Survey conducted in 2012 (FoodAPS-1) was an ambitious survey of Americans’ food acquisitions sponsored by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). The survey was challenging due to its goals of collecting comprehensive acquisition information and including data from extant sources to broaden the survey’s research capabilities. Some challenges were foreseen, and efforts were taken to overcome them through survey design features. Other challenges came as a surprise. This paper shares the experiences of the authors and others at USDA with survey design, survey implementation, and post-survey processing of data to ensure the availability of high-quality data to the research community. Lessons from FoodAPS-1 can inform similar future data collections both in the U.S. and abroad.     

ESTIMATION OF GLOBAL LOGISTICS EXPENDITURES USING NEURAL NETWORKS

Measuring the size of global logistics expenditure is a difficult task. What is an estimate of logistics expenditures for the global economy? The objective of this research is to answer this question. Using neural networks, an artificial intelligence methodology, logistics expenditures have been estimated at the country level. There are two main contributions from this research. The first is an update of previous estimates of global logistics expenditures. The second is continuous improvement of the estimation method, including information quality and availability as well as mathematical model refinement.