Under The Fiscal Decentralization Of Local Government "land Finance" Sizing And Cause Analysis

Under the background of fiscal decentralization, this paper estimates the scale of land finance for local governments and explores the causes based on the provincial data from2000to2009.First, it comprehensively researches the land use institution and land-transferring fees institution. Then, it divides land finance into three parts:revenue from compensated utilization of land, land-related tax income and other land-related income. The first part includes land-transferring fees, land rent and other land-supply income. The second part includes direct tax and indirect tax. The third one Last, other land-related income includes administrate fees and invisible income.Based on the revenue-sharing ratio between central and local governments under the current public finance system, this paper estimate the scale of local government land revenue by using the existing yearbooks. Between2000to2009,the scale of the local governments’ land revenue the rapidly expanded and local governments gained significant benefits from land.According to the estimated results above, it analyses the possible causes of land finance. There are mainly three factors affecting land finance:the fiscal gap, urbanization and competition between local governments. On the nationwide level, all of these factors have positive impact on land finance. For different areas, the eastern and central areas are more sensitive to the fiscal gap, while the western area are not. Meanwhile, only in the central districts the competition is significant correlated to the scale of land finance. In addition, the expectation of the land policy in2004had lead the local governments densely supply land in2003. Finance crisis of2008and its subsequent influence had negative impact for land finance.