发展workshop第17期

讲座题目：Flattening Governments, Flattening Growth: Equalization-Efficiency Trade-off in China's PMC Reform

主讲人：陈晓光，西澳大学商学院副教授

时间：2025年6月18日 （周三）10:30-12:00

地点：北京大学国家发展研究院承泽园校区246教室

摘要

Flattening government hierarchies not only reduces organizational layers but also restructures fiscal capacity, reshaping both local growth incentives and regional redistribution. This paper identifies a fundamental trade-off: while flattening promotes equalization across regions, it simultaneously undermines economic efficiency at the local level. We develop a multi-tier government model showing that reallocating fiscal authority upward enlarges common revenue pools, which enhance redistribution but dilute local governments’ incentives to foster growth. Empirically, we exploit China’s staggered Province-Managing-County (PMC) reform as a quasi-natural experiment and apply a stacked difference-in-differences strategy to county-level panel data from 2000 to 2007. We find that the PMC reform significantly reduced intra-provincial inequality — measured by Gini, Theil, and related indices — but concurrently lowered county GDP per capita by 11–12 percent. Reductions in private investment and firm-level productivity, rather than shifts in labor input, drove the efficiency loss. Heterogeneity analysis reveals that provinces with stronger fiscal pooling (higher VAT-sharing ratios) and broader administrative spans experienced a more severe equalization-efficiency trade-off. Our findings extend fiscal federalism and organizational structure theories by showing how hierarchy flattening and fiscal pooling jointly shape the balance between redistribution and local economic performance.

主讲人介绍

陈晓光，西澳大学商学院副教授，获伦敦政经学院博士以及北京大学博士学位，澳大利亚国立大学税收与转移支付政策研究所（TTPI）、清华大学中国财政税收研究所（NIFS）、中国人民大学财税研究所（IPFT）等机构兼职研究员。研究关注税收体系和租金攫取如何影响生产率、经济发展与增长，独立作者在Journal of Public Economics、Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization、《中国社会科学》、《经济研究》等中英文主流期刊发表文章多篇。获Gregory Chow最佳论文奖、中国首届公共财政论坛最佳论文奖。

Personal website: https://sites.google.com/site/xgchenist/