关键词: 地方政府债务, 收入分配, “借-用-还”对等机制, 财政风险

Abstract:

The fourteenth five-year plan and the long-term goal of 2035 clearly point out that we should solidly promote common prosperity and constantly enhance people’s sense of gain, happiness and security. After 40 years of reform and opening up, China’s economic development and wealth accumulation have experienced explosive growth, and great changes have taken place in income distribution. The Gini coefficient rose from 0. 288 in 1981 to 0. 491 in 2009, reaching its peak, and remained above 0. 46 in subsequent years. Adjusting the income distribution and narrowing the income gap has become an important part of the governance of all previous central governments. The 13th five-year plan takes it as the focus of the policy implementation. The report of the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China clearly points out that the main contradiction of the Chinese society has been transformed into the contradiction between the people’s growing needs for a better life and the uneven and inadequate development. As an important link between the fiscal revenue and the expenditure, the fiscal system and the financial system, the investment and the consumption, the real economy and the virtual economy, debt plays a role of “pulling one hair and affecting the whole body”. Thus analyzing the income distribution from the perspective of debt is helpful to comprehensively examine the role of the government debt in promoting the structural reform on the supply side, improving the quality of the economic development, meeting the public demand preference, balancing the development gap and the supply-demand mismatch, which has important theoretical value and policy implications.
Based on the existing public debt redistribution theory considering China’s special institutional environment and debt management practice, this paper takes the growing scale of the local government debt as the research object to systematically expound the internal mechanism of the local government debt affecting residents’ income and its distribution. The panel data of prefecture-level cities and the cross-sectional data of CGSS (2010) are used to test the impact of the local government debt on residents’ income gap from both macro and micro dimensions. The results of the study are as follows: (1) The local government debt has a certain income effect, and the excessive debt scale significantly aggravates the income gap of residents, especially the urban-rural income gap and the internal income gap of urban residents, which mainly comes from the operating income and the wage income gap. This is closely related to the biased production attribute and the bank lending attribute of the local government debt. (2) From the perspective of transmission mechanism, the debt financing, use and repayment mechanism of “loan-based, municipal construction-based and indirect tax-based” affects the redistribution effect of the public debt. (3) Marketization can reduce the cost of the debt financing to alleviate its adverse impact on the income gap. Unbiased debt expenditure structure helps to broaden the beneficiary groups of the local government debt. Stable and equal repayment sources help to weaken the distribution distortion effect of the debt repayment. In the process of controlling the scale and the risk of the local government debt, it is necessary to pay close attention to the effect of the debt redistribution, establish a debt operation mechanism of “borrow-use-repay” with equal responsibilities and rights, promote the marketization process of local government bonds, enhance the transparency of bonds, optimize the structure of the bond use and allocation, and take multiple measures to improve the performance of the bond use, so as to block the connection between the expansion of the local government debt and the income gap.
This study is not intended to deny the benefits of the local government debt, but to provide empirical evidence for a comprehensive evaluation of the economic welfare effect of the local government, and to provide some enlightenment for reducing the distribution distortion effect that may occur in the process of the local government debt operation. Of course, there are still some deficiencies in this study. With the improvement of the data system and the passage of time, we will use micro panel data for more robust analysis, so as to evaluate the intergenerational transmission and the long-term impact of the debt distribution effect.

Key words: Local Government Debt, Income Distribution, “Borrow-use-repay” Peer-to-peer Mechanism, Fiscal Risk