摘要
本文以2020年3月起中国地方政府陆续发放的消费券为切入点,根据消费券的具体特征,以及微信支付数据、疫情数据和城市经济状况数据,使用双重差分法、三重差分法和合成控制法来识别消费券的发放效果,并评估政府在助力经济复苏中的作用。本文主要有如下发现:第一,发放消费券可以促进消费,发券地区受支持行业的支付笔数比未发放地区同期同行业高约26.26%。第二,在第三产业占比高的地区,消费券显著增加交易活跃程度;定向低收入人群的消费券可以增加消费。第三,城市不发放消费券的主要原因是财力受限而不是消费券无效。本文建议,加大对贫困地区和低收入人群的消费券发放,并利用大数据技术,多策并举精准定位需扶持行业与人群,确保消费券发放透明、公正和高效。
The COVID-19 outbreak in late 2019 has posed unprecedented challenges to China and the world economy.China's economy shrank by 6.8 percent from last year in the first quarter of 2020.The epidemic prevention and control have led to a simultaneous contraction in production,consumption and foreign trade.The downturn in consumer spending has an especially large shock on small and medium enterprises and the low-income population.Therefore,rebooting consumption has become the top priority to stabilize China's economy,effective and swift measures must be taken to maintain household consumption and help enterprises survive.Under such circumstances,for the first time in China's history,local governments successively started to issue consumption vouchers from March 2020.The temporal and regional variations in voucher issuance allow for a Difference-In-Differences(DID)analysis.Using WeChat payment data provided by Tencent,we focus on industries including department stores,catering,cultural tourism,transportation,communication and residence and investigate the impact of consumption vouchers on the number and amount of WeChat payments.The analyses lead to three findings.First,the number of all-industry WeChat payments in the issuance cities is 4.202 percentage points higher than that in the non-issuance cities within the first month since the issuance.This means that the number of payments within the supported industry is 26.26%higher in the cities with vouchers than in the cities without vouchers.Second,using Difference-in-Differences-in-Differences(DDD)approach for a heterogeneity analysis,we find that the vouchers are more effective in cities with higher proportion of tertiary industries or when the vouchers are targeted at low-income groups.Third,using synthetic control method,we find that if non-issuance cities issue vouchers,the counterfactual number of WeChat payments will be higher than the actual number of payments,suggesting that the major reason for the non-issuance of certain local authorities is financial constraints rather than the ineffectiveness of voucher issuance.These exogenous constraints weaken the autonomy of the decision making of issuing vouchers,thus making the issuing process closer to a natural experiment,which lends support to the validity of our DID analysis.The results survive a battery of robustness checks.First,we construct artificial issuance dates by moving the actual dates 15 or 30 days backward and fit the data with the same DID specification.No stimulus in consumption is detected with these placebo regressions.Second,we plot the trends of transactions for cities with and without vouchers.The graphical evidence supports parallel trends assumption of the DID design.Third,we employ the Generalized Synthetic Control(GSC)method(Xu,2017),which allows for time-varying unobservable common factors with different factor loadings.The GSC estimates are very similar to that in the baseline analysis,suggesting that omitted unobserved common factors are little likely to create systemic biases for causal inference.Finally,to better understand the results,we evaluate to what extend the non-issuing cities are constrained by insufficient funds in their issuance decisions.In this regard,we utilize the synthetic control method to synthesize counterfactual consumption patterns of non-issuance cities.These findings suggest that Chinese local governments are capable of taking decisive actions based on the actual economic situation and the financial capacity of the local areas,and have made rapid moves in issuing consumption vouchers.The consumption vouchers are proven to have played a pivotal role in boosting demand and protecting enterprises and employment for the consumer voucher-oriented industry.However,the existing issuance of consumer vouchers is not enough to cope with the economic downturn caused by the COVID-19 outbreak.Therefore,local governments should consider increasing the issuance of consumption vouchers to poor areas and to the low-income people.Local governments with less financial strength should be allowed to use transfer payments or to increase the deficit ratios to support consumption voucher issuance.
作者
林毅夫
沈艳
孙昂
LIN Yifu;SHEN Yan;SUN Ang(Peking University;Renmin University of China)
出处
《经济研究》
CSSCI
北大核心
2020年第7期4-20,共17页
Economic Research Journal
关键词
消费券
刺激政策
经济增长
地区不平等
有为政府
Consumption Vouchers
Stimulus Policy
Economic Growth
Regional Inequality
Facilitating State
