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ID:
143443
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| Summary/Abstract |
Intergovernmental transfers are an important source of local public goods and services provision in many developing countries. Yet the empirical evidence on their effectiveness remains inconclusive partly because transfers are endogenous to political influence. This paper investigates the impact of a mix of intergovernmental transfers from a large-scale poverty relief program on local education spending in China between 1994 and 2000. Using a fuzzy regression discontinuity design, I first show no systematic evidence that counties benefiting from the program enhanced local education spending during the period of program implementation. I further show that the program has neither short-term nor long-term impacts on illiteracy reduction for the targeted counties.
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| 2 |
ID:
133951
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| Publication |
2014.
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| Summary/Abstract |
We argue that interjurisdiction competition in authoritarian regimes engenders a specific logic for taxation. Promotion-seeking local officials are incentivized to signal loyalty and competence to their principals through tangible fiscal revenues. The greater the number of officials accountable to the same principal, the more intense political competition is, resulting in higher taxation; however, too many officials accountable to the same principal leads to lower taxation due to shirking by uncompetitive officials and the fear of political instability. Using a panel dataset of all Chinese county-level jurisdictions from 1999-2006, we find strong evidence for an inverse U-shaped relationship between the number of county-level jurisdictions within a prefecture-our proxy for the intensity of political competition-and fiscal revenues in most provinces but not so in politically unstable ethnic minority regions. The results are robust to various alternative specifications, including models that account for heterogeneous county characteristics and spatial interdependence.
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| 3 |
ID:
133032
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| Publication |
2014.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Elites often use social policies to garner political support and ensure regime survival, but social policies are not a silver bullet. Using two waves of Chinese national surveys, I find that a recent policy of abolishing school fees has significantly increased citizens' demand for greater government responsibility in financing compulsory education. I argue that policy awareness, rather than policy benefits, drives citizens' demand. Finally, I show that policy awareness has enhanced citizens' trust in China's central government, but not in local governments. This asymmetry in regime support has two sources-the decentralization of education provision and biased media reporting-which induce citizens to credit the central government for good policy outcomes. Given that citizens' responses are primarily influenced by policy awareness that is promoted by the state media, this study casts doubt on the use of social policies to sustain long-term political support.
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