How Does Official Turnover Affect Infrastructure Investment?

Since the reform and opening up, China has sustained rapid economic growth and has made remarkable achievements. From the year 1979 to 2014, the growth rate of real per capita GDP has reached 9.75%, a lot of people call it a "growth miracle". A growing number of scholars believe that the "growth miracle" cannot achieve without the contribution of local officials, especially under the GDP primarily achievements appraisal system, the influence of the local officials to area economic growth is significant. Infrastructure investment itself as an investment directly promotes economic growth, at the same time its external spillover effect the promote development of other industries, and indirectly effect the economic growth, thus it is very popular with the local officials. In the year 1982, the Central abolished the system of life tenure in leading posts, established a retired system, gradually establish the cadre and personnel system with Chinese characteristics. Infrastructure investment leads by the local government, then it will affected by officials change and its own characteristics? This is the article will answer.In this paper, we select more than 289 regional and urban in our country, then according to the gradient of per capita GDP ranking in 2013, we choose 98 as the research object, then collect the data from 2000 to 2013 officials and city empirical test. In the statistical data of the official description, we found that from 2000 to 2013, there is 29.5% city mayor changes every year in our country, the average of each mayoral term is 3.14 years. In addition, during the 14 years, local officials have not shown younger trend, but official’s degree increased significantly. At the same time, over time, the long distance communication of local officials have become frequent. Based on this, paper studies the influence of local official’s empirical change on infrastructure investment, the main conclusion is that with the local official’s change the infrastructure industry of jurisdiction decline in investment spending, and more specifically, the average growth rate of infrastructure investment in the year mayor turnover happens is 0.51% lower than mayor turnover does not happens; With the turnover of local officials in last year, the spending of infrastructure investment in jurisdiction increases; officials during his tenure, infrastructure investment has an inverted "U" type feature; The younger local officials in replacement,the more change in working environment, the more increase of infrastructure investment in jurisdictions; At the same time, the more infrastructure investment by officials after taking office, the greater chance of promotion or parallel mobilization; In the GDP-based performance evaluation system, local officials intend to invest social infrastructure facilities and other economic infrastructure facilities which has a direct role in economic growth, rather than invest education of science and technology.This article highlights the influence by local officials in many factors which affect the infrastructure investment, and revealed the influence by policymakers on local infrastructure investment, to understand the factors which influence infrastructure investment and provides a new perspective. At the same time, from a dynamic point of view of government, supplemented the government intervention and the relevant literature and theory of political economic cycle, and provided empirical research between infrastructure investment and officials turnover, in addition, provided new ideas in system reform of the party and government leading cadres and personnel, in optimize the structure of infrastructure investment, improve the quality of investment.The shortcomings of this paper is in the study of the official turnover frequency affects the local infrastructure investment, in theory, the more frequently the local and the rest of the region officials replace, the more increase in the volatility of infrastructure investment. But in this paper, the empirical results show that the variable coefficient of change frequency of local officials is not significant. In addition, in order to enhance the opportunities for advancement are often of great importance to achieve short-term performance, local officials ignore the long-term development of regional economy, and even exists the phenomena of infrastructure duplication and waste of resources. Meanwhile, under the relative performance evaluation, the newly appointed officials often turned a deaf ear to the unfinished projects left by the former officials, resulting in decreased efficiency of infrastructure investment. Therefore, it is necessary to examine the efficiency of infrastructure investment from the perspective of local officials turnover, this is which the future need to improve and improve.