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。

Debt Limits,Land Financing and Local Government Implicit Debts

Implicit debts are important and challenging for China’s management of local government debts after the implementation of the new Budget Law.This paper builds a two-period model of local government behaviors to explore the effect of debt limit rules.It shows that local governments would take more off-budget activities to evade the fiscal restrictions and thus implicit debts accumulate.Better fiscal transparency and audit would mitigate these kinds of effect.We also find that land financing has different effects on local government financing platforms and Public-Private Participation.The result of empirical analysis using municipal-level data of China supports the hypotheses of the theoretical model.