摘要
同级政府内部不同部门之间决策互动对资源配置有重大影响,但学术界对互动的机制仍然缺乏足够的了解。本文构建了一个三级科层模型,分析发展改革委和财政两个综合性部门在经济增长目标和区域平衡目标之间的权衡,并利用市级面板数据实证检验发现:地级市获得省发改委审批的企业投资越多,得到省财政厅分配的专项转移支付也显著增加,且在东部经济发达地区更为明显。本文还利用中国投资管理体制改革弱化政府投资审批权的外生冲击,验证了上述结果的稳健性。本研究表明,当同级政府内部不同部门之间的政策目标和职能存在交叉,即使没有正式协调制度,部门之间存在政策工具的互动,并对资源配置有重大影响,这为理解地方政府的行为提供了新的视角。
Traditional government competition theory treats governments as a whole when analyzing their behavior, thereby neglecting the relationship between departments. However, evidence from China indicates that government departments have their own interests and exercise discretion in allocating their resources. Because there are no formal rules for interdepartmental coordination in China, the allocation of public resources is largely decided by the strategic interaction between departments. The report of the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China clearly stated that the government needed to “improve the coordination mechanism of economic policies”. Therefore, understanding the coordination and conflict between government departments is an important research issue, and it has practical significance for rationalizing the relationships between departments and promoting the reform of government institutions. This paper provides a rigorous theoretical and empirical analysis of the coordination between government departments. Specifically, we treat the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) and the Ministry of Finance (MoF) as interdependent decision-makers and analyze the effect of investment approval on the allocation of fiscal transfers. Overall, this paper helps to open the “black box” of internal government decision making. To analyze the coordination between departments, we establish a multi-tier model of public resource allocation. To preclude the endogeneity problem arising from the policy-making processes of central ministries, we limit our research to the departments of provincial governments. In the model, the provincial government departments make resource allocation decisions based on their own targets and the behavior of other departments. Then, the municipal government responds to the provincial governments and decides how to use the fiscal expenditure. Lastly, private investors make their investment choices. We show that the direction and extent of the policy coordination depend on the trade-off between economic growth and regional balanced development, and the nature of the interdepartmental coordination. Using micro-data on provincial-level firm investment in China to aggregate the proxy for provincial investment approval along with municipal-level data from 1998 to 2009, we empirically test and validate the existence of interdepartmental coordination. The greater the level of investment approved by the municipal government, the more special transfers it receives. However, this tendency is not observed for general transfers. These results indicate that China's local governments prefer to generate economic growth. To deal with the endogeneity problems arising from missing variables, we use central level investment, municipal level investment, and other investment as placebos. We also use three market factors as instrumental variables to deal with the endogeneity problems of simultaneous equations, because we believe that provincial investment is mainly determined by market factors and administrative factors while the simultaneity bias mainly comes from the administrative factors. Furthermore, using the investment system reform as an exogenous shock to the NDRC's right of approval, which eliminates the effect of investment approval on the special transfer payment allocation decisions, we confirm the robustness of our results and show the heterogeneity between different types of coordination. Our findings show that there is endogenous coordination between the development and reform commissions and their corresponding finance departments. The overlap of the objectives between departments leads to such coordination, which exists even in the absence of a formal coordination system. We believe that this form of endogenous coordination exists widely in China. Although our findings do not necessarily demonstrate whether this kind of department coordination is good or bad for administrative performance, our research provides a new perspective for understanding the behavior of local government and insights for the central government to adjust the form of interdepartmental coordination.
作者
郑新业
王宇澄
张力
ZHENG Xinye;WANG Yucheng;ZHANG Li(School of Applied Economics,Renmin University of China;Department of Economics,University of Pittsburgh)
出处
《经济研究》
CSSCI
北大核心
2019年第10期24-40,共17页
Economic Research Journal
基金
国家自然科学基金资助项目(71774165,71503261)的资助
关键词
部门协调
投资审批
转移支付
发展改革部门
财政部门
Department Coordination
Investment Approval
Transfer Payment
National Development and Reform Commission
Ministry of Finance
