Volume 10, Issue 2

In order to comprehensively study the influence of climate change on economic growth and energy conservation & emission reduction, this paper first uses the non-radial directional distance function (NDDF) to calculate the city-level green economic efficiency in China during 2003-2016. The causal effect of daily temperature changes on green economic efficiency is then identified to evaluate the economic consequences of climate change. It finds that relative to the 6~12℃ temperature benchmark, any decrease or increase in temperature will pose negative influence on green economic efficiency; moreover, such effects are only observed in developed cities, but not significant in less-developed ones. This reflects that the economic consequences of climate change are “robbing the rich” to some extents, which differs widely from the “pro-poor” conclusion in the majority of literature previously. Subject to the robustness test and with possible competitive explanations excluded, this finding still stands. The mechanism test reveals that temperature rise brings about economic consequences that “rob the rich” by affecting labor productivity, efficiency of energy conservation & emission reduction and execution of environmental regulations by local government. This study brings a different perspective for understanding the economic consequences of climate change and offers empirical basis for identifying responsibilities of local government in climate governance.

Unreasonable distribution of regional fiscal revenue may lead to fiscal imbalance, while narrowing the fiscal gap will help to establish a modern fiscal relationship between the central government and local governments with financial coordination and regional balance. This paper examines the 2016 VAT sharing reform to study the impact of tax sharing on fiscal imbalances, and puts forward a new plan to reconstruct the VAT sharing ratio. It has been found out in the study that the VAT sharing reform has alleviated the vertical fiscal imbalances caused by the reform of “replacing business tax with VAT” to some extent, but has aggravated the horizontal fiscal imbalances and widened the regional fiscal gaps. The deepening of horizontal fiscal imbalances is due to the aggravated differentiation of regional fiscal capacity after the VAT sharing reform. The adjustment of the principle on which the VAT is levied and the way by which it is shared is conducive to reducing interregional fiscal imbalances. This research is of reference to rationalizing the intergovernmental fiscal relationship, which is helpful to further clarify the implications of modern intergovernmental fiscal relationship and promote the construction of a modern fiscal system.

Accelerating the construction of modern fiscal and tax system helps not only free local governments from the shackle of the “competition for growth” development model, but also improve the governance capacity of local governments and realize the good governance of the country in the long term. Firstly, based on the typical fact of Chinese-style fiscal decentralization, this paper theoretically interprets the multiple channels and influencing mechanisms among vertical fiscal imbalance, transfer payment and local government governance. Secondly, it constructs a comprehensive index system to measure the governance capacity of local governments. The result shows that local government governance is relatively low in capacity and slow in improvement, and displays obvious regional heterogeneity. Then, the paper chooses structure and scale of transfer payment as mediator to construct the panel simultaneous equation model, and uses the three-stage least squares estimation (3SLS) for empirical investigation. The study finds that first, both the scale and structure of transfer payment may significantly affect local government governance, but the direction of the effects is opposite; second, the intensified vertical fiscal imbalance and the increase of transfer payment in scale can significantly inhibit local government governance, but the optimization of transfer payment in structure can significantly improve the governance; third, vertical fiscal imbalance not only directly inhibits the improvement of local government governance, but indirectly impedes it through the scale and structure of transfer payment.

The rapid rise of leverage in Chinese household sector in recent years has attracted considerable attention, and high housing prices might be the main reason for the phenomenon. Do different house-buying motivations of households give an impetus to it? Researching this problem is of great importance to understand mechanisms for the formation of household leverage and taking targeted housing policies. Theoretical analysis in this paper finds that if house-buying motivation that was speculative was quite obvious, rising housing prices would result in the leverage of non-first-house (NFH) households outpacing that of first-house (FH) households. On this basis, we conducted empirical analysis with a state-owned bank’s all housing mortgage loan data on 70 large and medium-sized cities for 2016 and the IV (instrumental variables) and DID (differences-in-differences) methods, and compared the two types of households from the inter-city and intra-city dimensions. The result showed that rising housing prices indeed drive up the debt balance and leverage of NFH households significantly more than those of FH households. Furthermore, our research found that a rise in housing prices has prompted NFH households to be more inclined to make the most use of mortgage policies with no substantial housing difference. To curb excessive leverage increase in the household sector, therefore, apart from regulating high expectations of housing prices, there should be stepped-up credit constraints on NFH households, thus restricting their behavior of excessive speculation.

The reasonable allocation of healthcare resources across different levels of healthcare facilities is the key to promoting the tiered diagnosis and treatment approach. The sudden outbreak of COVID−19 underscores the shortage of resources and service capability of China’s primary healthcare facilities. From the perspective of the vertical division of labor in the healthcare service system and based on the quality adjustment and quantitative correction of healthcare workers, this paper comprehensively calculates and analyzes the evenness of resources allocation between hospitals and primary healthcare facilities; and then, combining the theoretical model derivation with China’s empirical data test, this paper demonstrates how the misallocation of healthcare resources affects their utilization efficiency. The results are as below. (1) There are varying degrees of quantity and quality imbalance in various healthcare resources between hospitals and primary healthcare facilities. (2) When other conditions remain unchanged, the more misallocated healthcare resources are, the lower the “actual” utilization efficiency after quality adjustment is. (3) Compared with the absence of price regulation, government price regulation has led to a relative “overtreatment equilibrium” in the healthcare service market. Therefore, measures should be taken to optimize the structure of healthcare resources allocation and improve the efficiency of resources utilization, such as strengthening the government’s healthcare financing function, formulating policies that favor primary healthcare facilities, and encouraging social capital to invest at the community level.

The fight against the COVID−19 epidemic is a war against an “invisible enemy”. Access to accurate information and appropriate allocation of medical resources are key to containing the spread of the virus as soon as possible. The Chinese government has great power to collect information from individuals and basic-level organizations. It also has strong ability to pool and allocate medical resources. The fight against COVID−19 can be deemed as a quasi-natural experiment and based on this, we examine how government information capacity and medical resource allocation influence epidemic prevention and control in 286 Chinese cities (prefecture level and above). The findings are as follows: (1) Government information capacities improve the effectiveness of prevention and control policies. At city level, for every 0.1 point of increase in government information capacity score, the number of confirmed cases will reduce by 66.5, and the number of deaths per 10000 people will be down by 0.008. (2) The quantity of medical resources available has no direct influence on the effectiveness of epidemic prevention and control, but higher allocation efficiency does bring higher effectiveness. (3) The government can, on the one hand, allocate public resources based on information, and on the other hand guide the flow of social resources by releasing relevant information. Both can improve the allocation efficiency of medical resources. These findings have some policy implications for improving global emergency management.