| Traditional public finance holds that compared with the central government,local governments can better understand the needs of resident enterprises and obtain information about their preferences for public services,so they are more suitable as providers of public services.However,observing the supply of public goods in China in recent years,we can clearly feel the local government's preference of "laying stress on infrastructure,ignoring public services",and the local government's supply of public goods has long tilted towards economic public goods.In the top-down competition scale and the mandatory system of political centralization and economic decentralization,local governments pursue the rapid development of local economy in order to win the "GDP Championship" and are limited by the financial pressure brought by fiscal decentralization.Therefore,the craze of attracting investment and obtaining financial revenue by land finance among local governments began..It is true that local governments rely on land finance to speed up infrastructure construction,land finance may be one of the reasons for the distortion of local government public goods supply structure.In this paper,firstly,the internal logic of local governments' dependence on land finance to change their public goods supply behavior is abstracted: the more local governments depend on land finance to drive economic development and increase revenue,the more the focus of their government behavior will be to promote the transfer of land finance scale,and the corresponding need for supporting the transfer of land.Infrastructure increases the expenditure of economic public goods,and the means of optimizing the local public goods allocation structure to promote economic development and increase fiscal revenue are gradually ignored.As a result,expenditure on non-economic public goods is transferred to the expenditure on economic public goods.Then this paper uses the provincial panel data of 30 provinces except Tibet from 2007 to 2016 to test the results.The results show that whether in the static panel or the dynamic panel model,the local government's dependence on land finance increases,the corresponding expenditure on economic public goods will increase,and the expenditure on non-economic public goods will decrease and replace.The robustness test of indicators also yields the same results.This shows that land finance has solidified the local government's preference for " laying stress on infrastructure,ignoring public services ".Land finance has not only distorted the supply structure of public goods,but also caused a variety of adverse consequences,such as excessive housing prices,excessive local debt,economic fluctuations amplified.Abandoning land finance and breaking the dependence of local governments on land finance have become the mainstream views of domestic scholars.The central government hopes that the property tax will change the local government's dependence on land finance.On January 28,2011,Shanghai and Chongqing launched the property tax reform as a pilot province.Can property tax replace land finance to become a stable fiscal revenue for local governments? Is it conducive to improving the supply structure of local government public goods? Based on the prospects for the future,this paper also tested the changes of public goods expenditure and land financial dependence before and after the pilot of real estate tax in the pilot provinces.However,the empirical results in this paper are not satisfactory.After the pilot project of real estate tax,the expenditure on economic public goods in the pilot provinces has decreased significantly,but the expenditure on non-economic public goods has not changed greatly.The pilot project of real estate tax has not brought incentives for local governments to increase the expenditure on non-economic public goods.In addition,the dependence of the pilot provinces on land finance has not changed greatly after the property tax experiment,so the behavior logic of the local government has not changed,thus the structure bias of local government spending on public goods has not been fundamentally resolved.The fundamental reason is that this "narrow tax base,low tax rate" property tax pilot can not become the main source of income for local governments,can not ease the fiscal pressure of fiscal decentralization on local governments,can not support local governments to promote economic development competition,can not shake the local government's dependence on land finance.In addition,the pilot real estate tax policy is still based on the transaction price of real estate,local governments still do not have effective tools to capture the valueadded of housing prices from the link of property ownership.On the basis of the above empirical results,this paper puts forward a series of policy suggestions,such as breaking the monopoly of local government in the firstclass state-owned land transfer market,introducing rural collective land into the land market,gradually broadening the property tax base,establishing an effective housing price assessment mechanism,strengthening public supervision,improving the electoral system,and opening up the household registration system..This paper uses the degree of local government land financial dependence to measure the transfer of local government behavior.On the contrary,the traditional literature uses the income of land transfer as the explanatory variable to analyze the problem from the "income effect" of land finance.On the other hand,the traditional literature mainly uses the quantity of public goods as the explanatory variable,while this paper uses the expenditure of public goods as the explanatory variable.Quantity can better explain the local government's willingness to supply different public goods,so that the conclusion of this paper will not lose persuasion by the problem of the efficiency of public goods supply.At the same time,this paper empirically explores the impact of the current housing tax pilot on the public goods supply behavior and land financial dependence of local governments in the pilot provinces,and expands the existing literature on the housing tax pilot. |
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