题目：Fiscal Reform, Land Expansion, and Urban Growth in China

时间：2015年3月25日  星期三   12:00 – 14:00

地点：明德主楼610

报告人：刘勇政

摘要：The central government of the People’s Republic of China enacted a fiscal reform known as the “Province-Managing-County” (PMC) reform in the early 2000s. This reform eliminated the prefecture city government as the intermediate layer between the province and the county. We apply a difference-in-difference method using a panel data set of 263 cities nationwide over the period of 1999-2011 to examine how the introduction of the PMC reform affects the economic growth of the cities. Our results show that on average implementing the PMC reform moderately increases city growth by 0.8 percent. We argue that this unexpected positive growth effect of the reform is induced by the expansion of land supply of the reformed cities, which in the post-reform period have faced the need to look for revenues outside the budget system, mainly extra-budgetary funds in the form of leasing land. Our analysis provides evidence on this argument, and reveals that the reformed cities tend to expand land leasing at a speed that is 14 percent higher than the non-reformed cities. Furthermore, we show that the impacts of the reform tend to be strengthened over time following the introduction of the reform. Our results are quite robust across several robustness checks.

报告人简介：刘勇政，中国人民大学财政金融学院讲师，2013年获美国佐治亚州立大学经济学博士。研究领域包括公共经济学，发展经济学和中国经济。其研究成果发表于American Journal of Agricultural Economics, International Tax and Public Finance, Journal of Public Economic Theory, Public Choice, Journal of Regional Science, Journal of Development Studies, 《经济研究》,《政治学研究》等国内外刊物上。