Political Turnover And Local Government Size

Under the existing system of fiscal decentralization and political centralization,local governors which are motivated by the political promotion work on the planning of changing the local government size and implementing their policies.This paper studies the effects of political turnover on local government size,clarifies the relationships between political turnover and local government size,reveals the planning strategy of local government size and explores the mechanism of incentive.As a result,these findings can contribute to build analytical framework of governance and local government size theoretically and regularize governance behavior practically.This paper studies the effects of political turnover on local government size by the method of systematic GMM based on dynamic panel data from 1995 to 2013.It reaches the following conclusions:firstly political turnover in the current period significantly reduces local government size;secondly,the influence on local government size of political turnover during the tenure presents a feature of Inverted U Shape:negative effects appear at the initial term,which as the Inverted U Shape in left part depicts positive effects;positive effects appear at the medium term,during this period,the government size reaches its peak and then it remains stable,which as the Inverted U Shape in middle part depicts;positive effects weaken sharply at the final term,which as the Inverted U Shape in right part shows;thirdly,local governors focus on the construction,thus reducing expenditure size for science,education,culture and health,while enlarging expenditure size for capital construction in the medium period.According to the conclusions,this study puts forward some countermeasures and suggestions: At first improve the existing promotion mechanism and carry out the re-election system or the extension of ruling officials;Secondly establish a scientific performance evaluation system and take the happiness index as the performance evaluation system into consideration;Thirdly optimize the use of fiscal expenditure and plan local government size reasonably.