Intergovernmental transfer under heterogeneous accountabilities: The effects of the 2006 Chinese Education Finance Reform
Intergovernmental transfer under heterogeneous accountabilities: The effects of the 2006 Chinese Education Finance Reform
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异质责任下的政府间转移支付：2006年中国教育财政改革的影响
DOI：
10.1016/j.econedurev.2020.101985
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发表时间：
2020-08-01
影响因子：
2.2
通讯作者：
Ye, Xiaoyang
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Ding, Yanqing;Lu, Fengming;Ye, Xiaoyang
虽然政府间转移支付被广泛用于改善地方教育，但由于非民主国家的地方政府不对选举负责，它们如何分配财政转移支付仍不清楚。我们研究了2006年中国教育财政改革对公立学校支出的影响。通过比较1600个在时间和匹配比率方面受到不同对待的中国县，我们展示了自然的实验证据，说明异质的自上而下和自下而上的责任如何影响转移赠款的分配。平均而言，政府间转移支付并没有增加当地公立学校的总支出水平。其因果机制是，转移支付挤出了先前存在于预算外账户中的地方公共教育投资，这些投资未经上级政府审查和审计。异质性分析进一步表明，该政策只改善了公立学校的支出在县的公共雇员有更大的手段，使地方政府负责。
While intergovernmental transfers are widely used in improving local education, how local governments in non-democracies allocate fiscal transfers, given they are not electorally accountable, remains unclear. We study the impacts of the 2006 Chinese Education Finance Reform, one of the world's largest education transfer grants, on public school spending. By comparing 1600 Chinese counties that were treated differently in timing and matching ratios, we show natural experimental evidence on how heterogeneous top-down and bottom-up accountabilities affect the allocation of transfer grants. On average, intergovernmental transfers did not increase the total spending levels of local public schools. The causal mechanism is that the transfers crowded out preexisting local public education investments in extra-budgetary accounts that were not scrutinized and audited by upper-level governments. Heterogeneity analyses further demonstrate that the policy only improved public school spending in counties where public employees had greater means of holding local governments accountable.