官员来源、本地信息与地区经济增长——基于地级市数据的新证据

通常认为地方官员在地区经济发展中扮演着重要角色。文章基于1994-2012年中国24个省、自治区241个城市市委书记与城市的匹配数据,采用"倍差法"系统地考察了地方官员来源方式对地区经济增长的影响。研究发现,官员外调使得流入地的经济增长速度降低了0.98个百分点,外调官员对本地信息的缺乏是造成这一现象的重要原因。以地方官员前后任职地区之间的地理距离作为本地信息的代理变量,进一步发现,对一个外调官员而言,前后任职地区之间的地理距离越远,当前任职地区的经济表现越差。此外,官员横向交流和纵向交流对当地经济增长绩效并无显著的差异。研究结果对中国官员交流制度的进一步完善具有重要的政策参考价值。

Leader Sources,Local Information and Regional Economic Growth: New Evidence from City-level Data

It’s commonly believed that local government leaders play a significant role in regional economic development,as suggested by the promotion championship theory which states that the local government leaders are incentivized to promote economic growth.Following this stream of literature,this paper investigates whether the regional economic growth depends on the source of local government leaders.Since the 1990s,a series of measures have been introduced by the central committee of the communist party to promote the exchange of local government leaders.Consequently,in addition to promotion of leaders from the same region,exchange of leaders from different regions or from superior party/government departments has become a common way of appointment of leaders.Therefore,in this paper the leaders are divided into two types,the internally promoted and the externally exchanged.An internally promoted leader is from the same region where she/he has served,such as a municipal party secretary who has been working as the mayor in the same city.In contrast,an externally exchanged leader is appointed from another region(horizontally exchanged)or from a superior party/government department(vertically exchanged).Apparently,beyond work experience and other personal characteristics,different amounts of local information are possessed by leaders from different sources,whichis supposed to impact local economic development.The externally exchanged leaders may have some advantage over their internally promoted counterparts.For instance,the vertically exchanged leaders can bring project and/or policy support to the local economy due to their strong connection with superior departments.Nevertheless,compared with the internally promoted leaders,they may lack the necessary information on local resource endowment,industrial development and geographical advantage,which is critical to the local economy.For example,when a mayor is promoted as a municipal party secretary,the information she/he possesses could help to reduce misallocation of resources and increase production.By contrast,such information cannot be instantly obtained and utilized by an externally exchanged leader.The comparison give rise to the following questions:Does the leader exchange system actually affect the local economic growth?And if so,why?Based on the city-leader pair data collected for 241 cities in China’s 24 provinces during the period 1994-2012,this paper examines the effects of leader sources on local economic growth with difference-in-difference method.The results reveal that the GDP growth rate is lowered by 0.98 percentage point on average in cities with their party secretaries transferred from other places.Furthermore,to proxy for the local information of a leader we exploit the geographic distance between her/his currently and previously served cities,and we find that the economic performance is negatively associated with the geographic distance for exchanged leaders.In addition,no significant difference is observed between the leaders exchanged vertically and those exchanged horizontally.Therefore,the loweconomic growth rate associated with an exchanged leader can be attributed to her/his lack of local information.Our results are also robust to exclusion of abnormal observations and placebo tests.The paper has important policy implications on further improvement of leader exchange system.