关键词: 数字化治理, 智慧城市试点政策, 预算偏离, 多期双重差分

Abstract: Reducing budget deviation is the basic requirement of budget management. This paper regards the smart city pilot policy as a quasi-natural experiment in government digital governance, and uses a multi-period difference-in-differences method to evaluate the impact of the smart city pilot policy on government budget deviation. Typical facts reveal that the budget deviation of prefecture-level cities shows a downward trend during the sample period, and there exist phenomena of over-revenue and over-expenditure in budget deviations of most of the prefecture-level cities, which is different from the budget deviation scenarios of over-revenue and under-expenditure at the provincial level found in existing studies. The empirical results show that the smart city pilot policy significantly reduces government budget deviation, and the budget deviation of pilot cities is 17.05% lower than that of non-pilot cities on average. This conclusion still holds after a series of robustness tests and endogenous processing. Improving the quality of budget preparation and strengthening budget execution constraints are an effective way for digital governance to reduce government budget deviation. The heterogeneity analysis shows that cities with a high level of financial development and a high level of human capital can better play the role of digital governance in reducing budget deviation. In view of the above conclusions, this paper puts forward policy suggestions from the aspects of accelerating the construction of a new model of government digital governance, exploring the multidimensional path of digital governance to reduce budget deviation, and improving the flexibility and inclusiveness of policy implementation.

Key words: Digital Governance, Smart City Pilot Policy, Budget Deviation, Multi-period Difference-in-differences Method