| It has been nearly 60 years since New China was founded and 30 years since reform and opening up. Fiscal relations between central and local governments, which experienced a number of adjustments and decentralization, have achieved fruitful results and also produced some special phenomena. Apart from enjoying the results of the reform especially in such a particular point in time, if we could make a summary of the reformation practice over the past few decades with scientific research methodology at a theoretical level, we will not only give a scientific evaluation on the previous results of the reform, but also provide a theoretical reference for the practice of reform in the future.Two phenomena are closely related to China's fiscal decentralization observed by this thesis:Compared to the majority of less successful fiscal decentralization coutries, China's economic growth has shown the stability of high growth for decades and also many negative issues, such as the extensive growth, repeated construction, independent regime, income inequality, environmental degradation and so on (Referred to as "strong growth, weak development"). This thesis constructs a model based on the theory of market interlinkage in a perspective that local government officials are restricted by political promotion contract. The core of the model is to analyse local government officials' behavior choices under the simultaneous restrictions of fiscal decentralization contract and political promotion contract. The model holds the view that officials involved in the promotion contract will give more efforts to develop the economic sphere of a strong signal characteristic in the constraints of fiscal decentralization. That is, when there is promotion contract China's fiscal decentralization will promote economic growth. This conclusion is further supported by empirical tests. The positive researches break through the existing ideas of relationship research on fiscal decentralization and economic growth, use panel data of 27 provinces from 1995 to 2006 and highlight the study of economic growth performance under the institutional arrangements for fiscal decentralization and the restrictions of political promotion system. Focus on the characteristic of governor of a province or secretary of a provincial Party committee with the background of the central government or the faction of the central government, the extent of central government affects the local officials through the promotion contract is concretely quantified. Measurement results show that the coefficient of the interactive options between the political promotion's degree and fiscal decentralization is positive. That is, political promotion contract is conductive to motivate the improvement of fiscal decentralization performance.Based on theoretical analysis and empirical tests, this thesis proposes policy recommendations. At first the thesis reviews and evaluates the effect of changes in fiscal relations between central and local governments since the founding of New China, proposing that "centralization-decentralization" reform fell into a periodic cycle. The direction of future reform includes several aspects of thinking. First, at the present stage to maintain the associative feature of fiscal decentralization and political promotion contract remain unchanged. That is, the incentive effects of the fiscal decentralization.acting on officials and the constraint effects of the political promotion contract can not be separated. Second, optimizes the official promotion evaluation mechanism and alleviate the evils of multi-tasking features. Third, develops the monitoring power of citizens outside the system. Fourth, further improves the market economy system, narrows the range of officials' allocation of resources and restrains government actions. Fifth, further improves the legal system construction, fundamentally optimizes the political system and eventually replace the constraint effects of the political promotion contract acting on officials.This study is a bold attempt not only in bringing system related topics which are neglected by mainstream economics into the research vision, but also in refining and abstracting the special constraints suitable for China's national conditions from the practice of China's reform process. To combine the two together, the theoretical framework and the core concept proposed will contribute to the process of localization of mainstream economics and the improvement of theoretical value of China's reform practice experience.The second part is a literature review. It comes from the deficiencies of existing studies by the classified collation and evaluation of performance study on China's current fiscal decentralization and provides a clear direction for our researches. The third and fourth part are detailed study on properties of fiscal decentralization and political promotion contract, providing the basic research for the construction of the core model in this thesis. The fifth part is the core part. It learns associated contract model, take decentralization contract and promotion contract simultaneously into the analysis framework of local government officials' behavior and come to the hypothesis that when there is promotion contract China's fiscal decentralization will promote economic growth. Part Six is a positive part of the measurement and gives further demonstration of the above-mentioned hypothesis with panel data of domestic 27 provinces from 1994 to 2006. Part 7 and part 8 are parts of application as well as policy analysis. Part 7 analyses the pros and cons of the past "centralization-decentralization" reform. Part 8 proposes the next ideas based on the existing difficulties in the reform. Finally, it's the conclusions of the whole thesis.
|
PDF Full Text Request