The Separation Mechanism Of Policy And Budget Process Among Local Governments

China,which is undergoing in-depth reform and opening up,needs to utilize system thinking to solve the complex public administration problems of the multi-level governance.Public policy and government budget are two research areas that have attracted much attention in the field of public administration at home and abroad,but existing research rarely puts the two at the same level of analysis and systematically integrates them.In reality,the coordination between policy and budget can help the realization of good public administrative capacity among governments at all levels.This article attempts to integrate system analysis theory,fiscal decentralization theory and principal-agent theory,and integrate policy and budget into an analysis framework.Based on the above theory,an analysis framework is constructed to analyze the influence mechanism of the separation of the policy process and the budget process between local governments around the three aspects of “organizational environmentpower structure-resource allocation”,and then through empirical analysis to explore the reason why this phenomenon occurs.Antecedents,and its actual impact mechanism.From the perspective of organizational performance,the separation of the policy process and the budget process can be regarded as a performance degradation phenomenon in government organizations.This article measures the degree of separation between the policy process and the budget process from the degree of goal achievement,focusing on the departmental projects of the local government,and taking the deviation of the project goal as the dependent variable.A multiple regression model was used to analyze the data of 2815 projects transferred from Zhejiang Provincial Sports Lottery Fund to cities and counties from 2017 to2019.The empirical analysis found that,in terms of organizational environmental factors,the rate of change in the county's Sports Lottery Fund budget has a significant positive impact on the dependent variable.In terms of power structure factors,the two independent variables,the level of government with decision-making power and the level of government with executive power,can significantly and positively affect the change of the dependent variable.In terms of resource allocation process,project discretion and the type of sports industry projects can positively affect the change of dependent variables.Based on the above empirical analysis results,we can discover the specific mechanism of the separation between the policy and the budget process among local governments.Under the system analysis theory,there is a significant overall environment of “strong policies and weak budgets” in local governments in my country.The policy-led project process often ends with an eclectic policy objective assessment and budget objective assessment.This is the policy process of the organizational environment.The basic mechanism of separation from the budget process.Under the theory of decentralization,the trend of “decision-making up-execution down” in the project process has caused a“vertical pull” in the power structure,which has also greatly led to the continuous separation of the policy process and the budget process.In the three-level principalagent relationship of provinces,cities and counties,the principals and agents at all levels have obvious agency costs in the process of project operation,and the strategies adopted by agents to avoid high agency cost projects when encountering conflicts of interest,and face-to-face The strategy of choosing a low agency cost project form when information is asymmetry is an important reason for the drift of project goals or the decline of project performance in reality,which will aggravate the further separation of the policy process and the budget process between local governments.Finally,this study puts forward targeted policy recommendations and prospects for the future.In terms of improving the organizational environment of “strong policies and weak budgets”,we should strengthen the rigid constraints of policy-oriented budget expenditure projects by integrating the project operation system with the financial department as the core budget agency.And,unifying the policy and budget process with project goals as the core to reduce the occurrence of target drift and target alienation.In terms of improving the coordination of multi-level government powers of “decisionexecution”,the solution is to change the way of project task decision-making and broaden the channels for municipal and county governments to participate in decisionmaking at all levels.Another one is to further strengthen the downward shift of decision-making on specific matters by comprehensively coordinating the government level of project decision-making and execution.In limiting the transfer of agency costs in the resource allocation process,one is to introduce a market mechanism for high agency cost projects to avoid target drift.The second way is to block the possibility of low agency cost project forms,and bring into play the comprehensive effect of the project through planning integration and other means.In addition,this research also has some limitations,and the research can be further expanded based on the current foundation in the future.