Government Audit,regional Corruption And Public Expenditure Efficiency

In market economics,it is the government's important duty to provide public goods and to overcome the market defect.In recent years,the ratio of C hina's fiscal expenditure to GDP is growing.It was 12% in 1994,but it is 26% in 2015,and the growth rate remained at 20% in recent years.Such high financial expenditure has provided a solid guarantee for China's economic construction and social development.However,the current level of public services in China is not satisfactory.Why is the level of public services still insufficient under the background of the high total amount and increment of public expenditure? When the amount of financial investment is fixed,the efficiency of public expenditure determines the level of public service.A small change in the efficiency of public expenditure may have a great impact on the realization of the government's goal.Government audit is an important component of the state machine and it is an important part of the national governance system in supervision and control.The "People's Republic of national audit guidelines" According to Auditing Law of the People 's Republic of C hina,the purpose of the audit work is "maintaining the fiscal and economic order of the country,improving the efficiency in the use of government funds,promoting the building of a clean government and ensuring the sound development of the national economy and society".Auditor's performance report for 2015 shows the expenditure of National Audit Office is 1.553 billion for fiscal year 2015.In addition,the auditing results in the available currencies,such as fiscal revenue and expenditure reductions,and recovery(avoidance)losses,totaled 4,301.97 billion.The input-output ratio is 1: 260,which indicates that the government audit work for the country has saved a lot of financial expenditure.From auditing legislation to audit practice,government auditing has played an important role in improving public expenditure efficiency.However,there are few literatures on the impact of government audit on public expenditure.And the existing literature is mainly about the security of public expenditure and the transparency of fiscal expenditure policy.There is little research on public expenditure efficiency,and there is no literature on the path of how government audit affects public expenditure efficiency.Therefore,this paper will study the effect of government audit on the efficiency of public expenditure and the path of it.This paper begins with the development of government audit and the status quo of public expenditure and corruption.While combing the development history of government audit,we found that it has a great impact on the efficiency of public expenditure and regional corruption.Then we review the literatures related to government audit,public expenditure efficiency and regional corruption and find out that government audit may affect public expenditure efficiency through corruption governance.After that we propose theoretical hypotheses based on it.Finally,the empirical model is established and empirical results show that:(1)The government audit efficiency is positively related to the public expenditure efficiency.Specifically,the greater the government audit investment and the better the audit implementation can make the efficiency of public expenditure higher.(2)The government audit efficiency is negatively related to regional corruption.That is,audit investment and audit implementation have significant governance effect on corruption.(3)Regional corruption is negatively related to the efficiency of public expenditure.(4)Regional corruption plays an intermediary role in the process of government audit affecting the efficiency of public expenditure,that is,the better performance of government audit,the less corruption in the region,and thus the higher the efficiency of public expenditure.Specifically,the number of auditors,the number of audited units and problem rectification amount can improve the efficiency of public expenditure through its corruption control function.(5)Government audit has a sustainable positive effect on regional corruption and public expenditure efficiency.Even though the government audit has lagged behind two or three periods,the impact of audit investment on then is still significant.And problem amount correction rate still has an inhibitory effect on corruption after lagging behind three periods.According to the findings,this paper proposes to improve the auditing efficiency of public expenditure from four aspects: improving the efficiency of audit resource allocation,perfecting the audit result announcement system,perfecting the audit accountability and rectifying the long-term mechanism,and strengthening the budget management.The contribution of this paper lies in the following three aspects: 1)This paper studies the role of government audit in fiscal expenditure from the angle of public expenditure efficiency which enriches the research on the economic consequences of government audit.2)It is the first time to analyze the path of government audit affecting public expenditure efficiency from the three dimensions of prevention,disclosure and defense,which expands the research content of government audit.3)In the past,the research on corruption is mainly about the causes and economic consequences.Few literatures use empirical research methods to analyze the relationship between regional corruption and the efficiency of public expenditure.This paper makes up for this deficiency.