Fiscal Decentralization in China Revisited (中国财政分权政策再探): Fiscal Decentralization in China Revisited
Inter-governmental fiscal relations are crucial to understanding government behavior and policy instruments. Chinese style fiscal federalism with the absence of division of political power is regarded as central to understanding China's economic growth and governance. However, there is much debate about how exactly to measure China's fiscal decentralization. This paper develops a comprehensive framework to measure the level of Chinese fiscal decentralization across the tiers of government in the past two decades. This study finds that China is decentralized at both provincial and sub-provincial levels as a whole (the local level), but not at the xianqu level (the lowest levels of counties/districts and townships). There has been a slight decrease in fiscal independence at the provincial level, but it has been increasing at both local and xianqu levels, contributing to more accountable sub-national governments. However, the author argues for a stronger monitoring and evaluating capacity at the central level in order to build a performance-based fiscal decentralization system. A more transparent and rule-based fiscal transfer system should also be established to reduce regional disparity in China. 
 
 
 
政府间财政关系对于理解政府行为和政策手段十分重要。缺乏政治分权的中国式财政联邦制被认为是理解中国经济增长和中国政府管理理念的核心。但是，目前对于如何精确测定中国财政分权水平仍存有许多争议。本文制定了一套复杂的框架结构，来测定过去20年间中国各级政府财政分权的水平。本研究发现，总的来说，中国的省级和省级以下地方政府已经进行了财政分权，但是在县区级政府中却没有实现财政分权。过去20年间，省级地方政府的财政独立性有所降低，但是省级以下和县区级政府的财政独立性却不断提高，原因是省级以下地方政府职责不断增加。但是，作者认为中央政府应增强监控和评估能力，以创建一个基于绩效的财政分权系统。同时，还应该建立一个更加透明的，基于统一规则的财政转移支付系统，来缩小中国的地区差异。