Suchergebnisse

A comprehensive, up-to-date, insightful, and innovative masterpiece on the Chinese public finance has finally emerged to fill the gap in the field. Considering China's public finance in its entirety, from tax systems, government spending, infrastructure financing, fiscal policies, local government debt, and central-local fiscal relationships to urban and rural social security and healthcare, it analyses China's public finance reforms and examines the reasons and the consequences of these reforms. It explores the challenges to China's public finance, examines its problems, and suggests potential solutions. While covering a broad range of themes, this book remains judicious with the evidence, providing its readers with innovative yet careful conclusions. Using enormous amount of the latest data and illustrative diagrams, the author explains China's public finance with expertise and clarity. This is an indispensable resource for students and scholars from a range of disciplines with an interest in the Chinese economy.

In 2014, China's total government debt was an estimated 60% of gross domestic product (GDP), close to the upper limit set by the European Union. The Xi administration has set budget deficit at 3% of GDP for 2016 and announced that government budget revenue will grow only 3.2% in 2016! It has also recently abolished local government financing vehicles, legalised local government bond issuing in 2014 and started "the debt swap" reform.

There are several thousand administrative and operating fees, compared to 23 taxes in China. Excessive fee collections are largely targeted at business enterprises and farmers. The growth of fee collection resulted from the increase in the gap between government expenditures and revenues, the self‐collection and self‐utilization policy, and weak law enforcement. Excessive fee collection tends to reduce businesses'investment incentive, aggravate income inequality, breed corruption, and distort the fiscal system. Fee reduction is not possible if the government size and revenue shortage problems of local governments persist. Policy options such as cutting government size are recommended. (JEL H20, H87, P35)

This paper analyses China's foreign and domestic debt. Foreign debt poses no threat to China. Although China ranks high in terms of total foreign debt, the relative size of its foreign debt to GDP is small, and all its risk exposures are low. Also, China's foreign exchange reserves are much higher than total foreign debt outstanding. As for its domestic government debt, the figure is large but manageable. There are four major types: explicit fiscal debt which is the result of expansionary fiscal policy, unreported local government debt caused by the 1994 tax reform, state banks' bad loans resulting from fiscal and SOE reforms and which may become the largest fiscal liability, and finally, fiscal subsidies made to social security pension funds. Despite its debts, the Chinese government still has massive assets.

This paper examines the effect of exports on economic growth based on the data of 30 Chinese provinces from 1978 to 1995. A theoretical model is based on the neoclassical production function, in which exports can affect output growth. It was found that the growth rate of exports and the growth rate of per capita output are positively related; i.e. provinces with faster growth of exports grew faster than the provinces with slower export growth. It was also found that investment in state enterprises was insignificantly related to output growth, while investment in private enterprises was positively related to growth.