How Does the Reform of Local Government Debt Management System Affect Common Prosperity?—From the Perspective of Local Fiscal Revenue and Expenditure Behavior
The reform of the local government debt management system is a major initiative to comprehensively promote the modernization of the national governance system and governance capacity.Using annual data from 270 prefecture-level cities in China from 2010 to 2021 as a sample,this paper employs the formal implementation of the new"Budget Law"as an exog-enous policy shock to construct a quasi-natural experiment,and deeply analyzes the impact and mechanisms of the reform of the local government debt management system on common prosperity.The results show that the reform of the local government debt management system can effectively drive common prosper-ity,and this conclusion is still valid after a series of robustness tests.Mechanism analysis indicates that the reform of the local government debt management system plays an important role in improving the fiscal revenue and expenditure behavior of lo-cal governments.It can significantly enhance the fiscal operation and public expenditure efficiency of local governments by improving their bias towards expenditure on people's livelihood,enhancing efforts to rationalize taxation,and strengthening budget constraint rigidity,thereby effectively promoting the process of common prosperity.Heterogeneity analysis shows that the promoting effect of the reform of the local government debt management system on common prosperity only exists in the central and western regions and samples with lower administrative levels.When the higher-level government is relatively effi-cient,this promoting effect becomes more prominent.After the reform of the local government debt management system,the value rationality and administrative efficiency of local governments are significantly improved.This study not only reveals the income distribution effect of government debt governance but also provides policy references for clarifying the boundary be-tween government and market and promoting common prosperity in high-quality development.The potential marginal contributions of this study are as follows:First,it identifies the relationship between the reform of the local government debt management system represented by the new"Budget Law"and the process of common prosper-ity.With the deepening of"preventing and resolving major risks",the academic community has begun to explore the gover-nance mechanism design of government debt and its policy effects.However,no literature empirically studies the impact of lo-cal debt governance on common prosperity from the perspective of common prosperity.Second,it deeply explores the income distribution effect of the reform of the local government debt management system.Regarding related research on Local Gov-ernment Debt governance,most of the discussions focus on the impact on the operational level of enterprises,while few schol-ars have paid attention to the regulatory functions beyond micro-governance.This study provides new empirical support for the policy effects of the reform of the local government debt management system.Third,based on the reality of"risk preven-tion"and"stable growth",it theoretically explains the basic logic of the reform of the local government debt management sys-tem driving common prosperity.It is found that there are dual transmission paths of optimizing the structure of local fiscal rev-enue and expenditure and strengthening budget constraint rigidity,providing theoretical references for promoting the realiza-tion of common prosperity.
Reform of Local Government Debt Management SystemCommon ProsperityThe New Budget LawIncome Distri-bution
NETL
NSTL
万方数据
