Research On The Impact Of Transfer Payment On Local Government Land Financial Effort

With the continuous development of China’s economy and society,local governments play an increasingly important role in the process of modernization of state governance.Under the system of promotion of existing officials,the government often improves the political achievements by obtaining regional economic development results,which makes the local demand for financial funds grow,and land finance emerges.Land finance has promoted the process of industrialization and urbanization in China and achieved the rapid development of China’s economy in the past years.Through land finance,land-based wealth and land-based financing have gradually become the main means for local governments to ease fiscal pressure,speed up economic development,and create political achievements.However,as China’s land finance develops to maturity,the degree of dependence of national economic development on land finance has reached a high level.Excessively expanded land finances generate financial risks,macroeconomic risks and social risks,which hinder the transformation of China’s economy from a high-speed growth model to a high-quality growth model.Therefore,it is of great theoretical and practical significance to study whether the central transfer payment to the locality has a restraining effect on the land financial efforts and how the mechanism works.It is of great theoretical and practical significance for China to transform its economic growth model and sustainable development.The generation and development of land finance cannot be separated from the influence of promotion incentives.In political tournaments,the subjective desires of personal promotion often have a broad and profound impact on the exercise of government functions.Taking the land financial effort to measure the subjective initiative of land finance,we can quantify the scale change of land finance.Therefore,by studying the impact mechanism of central-to-local transfer payments on land financial efforts,an effective method for regulating the scale and structure of land finance can be sought.This paper selects the panel data of 31 provincial administrative units in China from 2011 to 2015.First of all,this paper measures and analyzes the local government land financial efforts.Then,this paper uses the land financial effort as the explanatory variable,transfer payment as the explanatory variable,urbanization degree and relative wealth as the control variable,establishes the empirical regression modelbased on the panel data,and conduct a robustness test by adjusting the data classification and replacing the research variables.The results show that,on the one hand,there are significant regional differences and time trend characteristics in local land financial efforts;on the other hand,central-to-local transfer payment is partially compensated by the fiscal gap,which can weaken the local government’s land financial effort,but the weakening effect of different regions is very different.Based on the conclusions of this study,this paper proposes a series of policy recommendations including general principles,mechanism construction and supporting measures.By improving the implementation process of transfer payment,optimizing the target regional structure of transfer payment,and adjusting the transfer payment strategies of different economic regions,the local government’s land financial efforts will be adjusted to promote the economic growth model transformation and sustainable social development.The innovation of this paper is to integrate the influence of promotion incentives in the measurement process of land financial efforts,systematically analyze the mechanism of transfer payment affecting land financial efforts,and empirically study the impact of central-to-local transfer payments on land financial efforts based on panel data from all provinces.It is expected to provide reference value for regulating the scale of land finance,improving the independence of local financial structure and the soundness of industrial structure.