An Empirical Analysis Of The Budget Supervision Power Operation Of Local People’s Congresses In China

Budget Supervision is an important part of the local public financial supervision.Local People’s Congresses oversee budget accounts by supervising the financial activities like the behavior of governments’ revenue and expenditure. They play an important role in preventing governments’ abuse of power. Since 2015, the new Budget Law of China has been implemented. This has taken a big step for the legalization of the budget and the promoting the modernization of the current governance. The budget supervision of our local People’s Congresses has made great progress since it developed. However, there are still many problems. Currently, the budget supervision power of local People’s Congresses given by laws, has showed serious vacant phenomenon. If we want to find the problems basically and clarify the causes of the problems, we need to proceed from realities and study from local People’s Congresses’ existing practice.To facilitate the collection of the data and the comparative research on the issue,this paper focuses on China’s mainland 31 provincial administrative units as the basic areas of the research. Summing up, we can find that the legal safeguard, the balance mechanism, and the organization construction have become internal factors, which affect local People’s Congresses’ budget supervision power. On the legal norms, all provinces have formulated corresponding local regulations or decisions to fully protect the power of local People’s Congresses’ budget supervision. On the balance mechanism, the executive authorities and the legislature have basically formed a clear division of labor. On the setting of the specialized agencies for respective local People’s Congresses, the provinces have relatively completed specialized agencies like the Finance Committee and the Budget Committee to be responsible for implementing the budget supervision.It should be noted that local People’s Congresses, budget supervision power has been developed. However, in practice, there is still some inadequacy in the power of local People’s Congresses’ budget supervision. There is still a considerable distance between these existing problems and a budget state that we are striving to be. Themain problems are as follows. First, in terms of the legal system, the local laws and regulations are not unified and they have poor operability; second, in terms of the balance mechanism, the substantive power of the budget supervision should be improved; third, in terms of the organization construction, organizations of the local People’s Congresses are weak, deputies’ capabilities of supervision still need to be improved. It is true that the tax sharing reform has led the initial establishment of the financial system and local governments have the certain autonomy. Due to the blurry distribution of the administrative and financial authority, local governments’ financial resources cannot meet the growing economic needs. This paper holds that the authority of the budget supervision is still insufficient in the level of national constitution and the laws; the horizontal power allocation is unbalanced, the vertical division of the administrative and financial authorities is not clear; the mechanism about the organization construction is not perfect. These factors result in the formalization of the local People’s Congresses’ budget supervision. Therefore, this paper argues that we should specify authorities, unify and refine local regulations,improve local People’s Congresses’ budget supervision mechanism, and improve the capacity of local People’s Congresses’ budget supervision power, in order to discuss how to improve the expected result of China’s local People’s Congresses’ budget supervision, under China’s present socio-economic conditions and practical national conditions.