Province-Managing-County Fiscal Reform And Educational Expenditure Of County Finance

To solve the problem of inadequate investment in the county level education caused by the fiscal longitudinal imbalance after the reform of the tax system,there are two ways now:centralization and decentralization.The reform of centralization shifts the burden of basic public services,but it is faced with problems of regulation and motivation.But Province-Managing-County(PMC)Fiscal Reform aims to enrich the county-level financial resource,stimulate the economy development,and provide a new idea to settle the problem of financial resources of the county level education.This article is based on the 30 provinces'(except Tibet autonomous region)related social and economic data to create panel database,uses the proportion of counties that have implemented reform as the agent variable of the PMC fiscal reform to perform multivariate regression analysis,in order to explore the changes of educational fiscal expenditure before and after the reform.The results show that in the whole country,the PMC fiscal reform has a significant positive effect on the expenditure of rural compulsory education.To increase the reliability of the results and the robustness of conclusion,this paper divides overall samples into three groups(eastern,central and western)according to the geographical area,then measure the influence in different regions.We can find that in the eastern region,the reform can significantly raise the level of financial expenditure of education;In the central region,the reform has negative effects on the compulsory education in compulsory education stages,but it is not statistically significant;In the western region,the reform effect is more complicated,which has a negative influence on the primary school stage and has a positive influence on junior high school stage,but it is also not significant.County-level government is the main supplier of basic education,To examine the effect of fiscal reform on the fiscal expenditure of county-level education,on the basis of provincial panel data analysis,the paper continues to select the eastern province-Fujian,central province-Hunan,western province-Guizhou as representative provinces,and use the county level data of the provinces to conduct empirical research and provide case support.The results show that there is a significant positive effect between the reform and the financial expenditure of education in Fujian province,and this positive effect maintains and the influence coefficient increases after the annual trend term is added.The DID factor of fiscal reform in Hunan province in 2010 has a negative effect on the level of financial investment of education,which is not statistically significant,after effectively control selection bias,the negative effect change to be significant.The reform of Guizhou province in 2009 and 2013 have a different impact on the fiscal expenditure of county education,although there are positive effects,the second reform has less impact on the financial expenditure,and the first reform effect is significant,the second one is not significant.The results in these three typical provinces are consistent with the results of the regional analysis before.Based on the empirical analysis results and relevant explanations,this paper proposes some policy suggestions.First,different districts should promote the fiscal reform according to their own conditions,some areas can continue to explore the comprehensive PMC reform to guarantee the financial supply level of county-level education.Second,Improving the promotion and incentive system of government officials,establishing a public service product indicator system to achieve balanced development of fiscal revenue,economic growth and public product supplement.Third,improving the supervision and management mechanism,increasing the transparency of financial expenditure at the county level,and introducing more power to supervise local governments.Fourth,we should clearly divide the central and local joint fiscal responsibility and expenditure duty,increasing support for education from the central government,in order to accelerate the equalization of basic public services...