How Does Educational Background Of Secretary Of Municipal Party Committee Affect Regional Total Factor Productivity?

Official leaders play a major role in regional economic management and Total Factor Productivity is an important indicator to measure the economic effect of an officials' administration.However,few scholars have studied the impact of local officials on TFP.This paper firstly studies the basic problem—how educational background of secretary of municipal Party committee will affect regional economic development quality.The empirical results show that:higher education level of secretary of municipal party committee helps to enhance regional TFP.Humanities,economic management and social science have a significant positive impact on the quality of regional economic development.Considering time lag of one period and two periods,agricultural science and science&engineering also play a significant positive impact.Secondly,this study further studies from three aspects.First,considering the influence of officials' moral character on their management performance.This paper combines the theory of "grabbing hands" and "helping hands" with the influence of officials' personal characteristics on the local economy for the first time in this field,which is a new breakthrough in the perspective of research.The result shows that the officials of poor moral character have less influence on the quality of local economic development,compared to those of good moral character.Second,we consider three ways of the division of the whole sample.From the perspective of space:1.The test results show that in economically developed regions,the personal characteristics of secretary of municipal party committee can play more limited role,while in the underdeveloped western regions,the counterparts can play a greater impact on TFP.2.We divide cities into first-tier cities,second-tier cities and third-tier cities and then carried out the empirical study again,the results are similar.3.Because of the specialty of political system in China,277 prefecture-level cities are divided into ordinary prefecture-level cities and sub-provincial cities.The sub-provincial cities enjoy the provincial economic management authority.The results show that the influence of the officials' educational background on regional TFP in the sub-provincial cities is weaker than that of ordinary prefecture-level cities.Third,from a time perspective,as time goes by,the specific professional background plays a more and more important role in TFP,while the compound educational background is increasingly significant.Thirdly,this paper further examines the mechanism of the official education background to the economic development.The results showed that the educational background of officials will influence the industrial structure and then further influence the regional TFP;poor moral character of officials weakens the influence of educational level on the regional TFP;no obvious evidence can show that fiscal expenditure is the influence mechanism of official educational background to regional TFP.Based on the theory and empirical analysis,this paper gets some suggestions:Central and local authorities should strengthen knowledge and professionalization in the selection of officials;the central and local governments should strengthen the moral construction of official leaders,pay more attention to both ability and political integrity when selecting official leaders.