关键词: 收入分成, 财政分权, 省份内经济差距, 地方政府竞争

Abstract:  Regional disparity in China has gradually become one of the important constraints for further economic development and hence received widespread academic attention. However, economic disparity within provinces, acting as the main component of the overall regional disparity in the country, has not been examined rigorously. This paper aims to explore how intergovernmental revenue sharing at the provincesubprovincial level may affect economic disparity within provinces through the channel of local fiscal competition. Based on county level panel data from 1995 to 2014, this paper first builds both the indexes of economic disparity within governments and subprovincial revenue sharing ratios and then conduces empirical estimations. Our results indicate that: subprovincial revenue ratios significantly increase the disparity of county effective tax rates within provinces, which, in turn, induce unbalanced distribution of tax bases and hence exacerbating economic disparity within governments. This effect is also found to be more salient in less developed provinces. Overall, our study contributes to a better understanding of regional disparity in China and the modernization of Chinas system and capacity for governance from the perspective of fiscal decentralization arrangement.

Key words:  , revenue sharing, fiscal decentralization, economic disparity within provinces, local government competition