A Study On The Matching Of Officials And The Expenditure Efficiency Of Local Government Debt Funds

During the miracle of China’s economic growth in the past three decades,the Chinese government has adopted various fiscal policies to stimulate the development of local economy.These policies not only ensure the stable growth of China’s economy,but also derive many local government debt problems,affecting the financial security of local governments,and even threatening the sustainability of economic development.While the risk problems caused by the huge scale of government borrowing are frequent,there are also problems in the use of debt funds,such as inefficient management,poor operation,unfulfilled debt repayment responsibilities,etc.,which make government debt unsustainable in the process of operation,and further trigger the risk of debt fund use efficiency and debt default.How to effectively and efficiently use local government debt funds to alleviate financial pressure,reduce debt risk and promote high-quality development of local economy has become an urgent problem to be solved.However,China’s financial phenomenon is inextricably linked with the logic of officials’ behavior.From the perspective of new political economics,as the real subject of local government-local officials,they largely determine the behavior and performance of local governments.The efficient cooperation and cooperation between officials at the same level within the local government organization is an important key factor to deal with the local debt problem.The interaction between local officials will have an impact on the government behavior,the rational allocation of local debt funds,and the key decisions and implementation of the investment of funds in specific areas.At the level of prefecture-level cities,the secretary of the municipal party committee and the mayor of the city,who belong to the "top leaders" of the city’s party and government,may be related to the development of the city’s financial health in terms of their respective role positioning,division of labor and coordination,and decisionmaking considerations,as well as the related issues that this article wants to discuss in depth: whether the government’s debt funds can be used efficiently.How the collocation of officials will affect the local financial situation,especially how to affect the expenditure efficiency of local government debt funds,is a question worthy of discussion.Is the diversity of the background of the city’s "senior management" conducive to or not conducive to the optimization of local government debt issues,and can it optimize and improve the allocation and level of public resources and services? The research on this issue is of positive significance for deepening the understanding of the role of local government official allocation in optimizing urban financial expenditure.This paper first establishes a set of evaluation index system for the efficiency of local debt fund use,defines the range of debt fund input to output from municipal infrastructure construction,science,education,health and other industries,and calculates and evaluates the efficiency of local debt fund expenditure in 288 prefecturelevel cities in 31 provinces from 2012 to 2021 using DEA model.Through the manual collection and collation of the resume data of the party and government leaders of each prefecture-level city in the same period from 2012 to 2021,the time of office of each prefecture-level city chief official is sorted into a table,and the resume information of each official is thoroughly excavated and checked,and the three main aspects of the diversity of basic characteristics among officials,the diversity of education background,and the diversity of personal experience are selected as the research object of the official matching.This paper empirically analyzes the impact of the homogeneity and heterogeneity between the main local party and government leaders on the efficiency of local government debt expenditure.The results show that:(1)when the age difference between the municipal party secretary and the mayor is greater,the efficiency of local debt funds will be significantly reduced;(2)The combination of the mayor and the secretary of the municipal party committee will significantly improve the efficiency of local debt expenditure if there are female leaders in the mix;(3)When the difference between the academic qualifications of the secretary of the municipal party committee and the mayor is greater and the professional background has a qualitative deviation,the expenditure efficiency of debt funds will also be reduced;(4)Whether the leaders in the official mix have central work experience,economic department work experience and enterprise work experience has no significant impact on the efficiency of debt funds.In the further analysis,this paper analyzes the mechanism of the relationship between the allocation of officials and the efficiency of government debt expenditure.This paper finds that the mechanism of the influence of official collocation on the expenditure efficiency of debt funds is that official collocation will have a significant impact on local government competition behavior and local financial stability.Specifically,the age gap,education gap and professional background gap of the official matching portfolio are significantly negatively correlated with the government tax competition,the age gap and education gap are significantly negatively correlated with the public investment competition,and the gender diversity of the portfolio is significantly positively correlated with the public investment competition.In the robustness test,this paper first explains the endogenous problem,and further tests the robustness of samples,and the results are still consistent.Then,by replacing the explanatory variable and the explained variable: replacing the technical efficiency that originally measured the efficiency of debt capital expenditure with pure technical efficiency for further regression test,replacing the explanatory variable that originally measured the heterogeneity of official collocation with the indicator that measured the homogeneity of official collocation,we found that the result was still stable.Finally,this paper regresses the problem of the timeliness of the policy and the delay of the decision-making effect made by the combination of officials by lagging the explanatory variables for one period,and finds that the results are still stable.Finally,the main conclusions of this paper are summarized and elaborated,and corresponding suggestions are put forward on the optimization measures of relevant policies,official portfolio allocation,and debt capital expenditure efficiency.Starting from the interaction between internal officials,this paper studies the impact of the combination of officials on the efficiency of local government debt expenditure,and analyzes the impact mechanism,which further enriches the theoretical research of the combination of officials on local government debt.In addition,it also differentiates the regional plate differences,the per capita GDP development level differences and the urban administrative level differences of the cities,and focuses on the differences in the impact of the official collocation on the performance of debt capital expenditure under different circumstances of the cities in combination with local realities,providing a new perspective for the relevant research on optimizing debt capital expenditure.The research in this paper helps the country to realize the impact of interaction effect and combination of officials on local debt at the level of official appointment,so as to select the appointed officials as a reference for optimizing the efficiency of local debt fund expenditure,and provides new thinking for the country to appoint officials and the understanding of optimizing the efficiency of debt fund use.