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ID:
193190
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| Summary/Abstract |
Decentralized court finance and personnel management practices have been criticized for breeding extra-judicial interventions and corruption in China. Determined to advance law-based governance and to constrain recalcitrant local leaders, the Chinese leadership under Xi Jinping in 2014 rolled out reforms to centralize local court finance to the provincial level with the aim to sever local courts from local influence. Despite high expectations, implementation is at best partial. Close to half of all provinces have not accomplished the required changes, and more than half of all court expenditure continues, to date, to remain reliant upon local governments. The direct reason is that provincial governments lack sufficient and sustainable fiscal capacity to finance the operation of local courts without central assistance. Different interests between major stakeholders, namely the courts and the fiscal bureaus, also add to coordination problems and difficulties in reform implementation, in particular the tension between fiscal adequacy pursued by the judiciary and fiscal management efficiency stressed by finance bureaus.
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| 2 |
ID:
182981
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| Summary/Abstract |
The COVID-19 pandemic caused a lockdown of Wuhan, and strict control was imposed in many major Chinese cities, including the national capital of Beijing. Residents’ committee workers at the grass-roots level have played a critical role in the enforcement of the government’s pandemic prevention and control measures, through their day-to-day service and surveillance as local community managers. This article examines their work in Wuhan and Beijing neighbourhoods during the most critical periods of the outbreak, from late January to June 2020, and the challenges the workers faced as executors of the government’s community-based prevention policy. The two cities have developed different community strategies because of very different epidemiological situations and city functions.
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| 3 |
ID:
139258
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| Summary/Abstract |
Local governments in China are seriously under-funded relative to their assigned expenditure responsibilities for public services, resulting in the infamous ‘revenue–expenditure gap’. The dominant explanation of local fiscal difficulties given in the literature refers to central government behaviour, namely the excessive centralization of tax revenue, but it does not tally with the large flows of central subsidies to local coffers in more recent years. The alternative account we put forward stresses the working of an intermediary level embedded in the multi-tiered governance structure of a large country, and the interaction between local officials' fiscal behaviour and the revenue–expenditure gap. Employing fine-grained analysis of aggregate statistics and local case data, we argue that broader intergovernmental dynamics and practices of local intermediaries, and not only central government policy, are critical to fiscal health and government performance at the county level.
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