主题：Top-down Monitoring or Top-down Encroachment? How Centralization Undermined Fiscal Capacity in Imperial China
主讲人：刘正铖 浙江大学
主持人：罗唯 暨南大学
时间：2024年11月7日（周四）下午14:30-16:00
地点：暨南大学石牌校区经济学院大楼（中惠楼）102室
摘要
A common feature of low-capacity states is informal and fragmented local fiscal systems outside budgetary oversight. Centralized fiscal administration is considered important for building an effective fiscal state. However, centralizing fiscal authority may create scope for top-down encroachment between vertical levels of government and lead to negative unintended consequences. This paper studies how a centralization policy aimed at monitoring local taxation affected fiscal capacity in imperial China. We exploit predetermined variation across counties in exposure to centralization that replaced local governments’ unsupervised autonomy in local revenues with transfers from provincial governments. Using newly collected administrative data on tax collection records, we find that centralization undermined fiscal capacity, evidenced by a large increase in tax revenue deficits. Evidence suggests that counties bypassed regulation by manipulating disaster reporting and requesting tax exemption. We provide evidence consistent with the mechanism of provincial encroachment on local revenues, which undermined the fiscal conditions of counties, thereby impairing administrative capacity or forcing them to embezzle central tax to maintain local expenditure. Finally, we show that centralization caused an increase in protests against taxation.
主讲人简介
刘正铖，浙江大学经济学院百人计划研究员，他于2017年获得北京大学经济学学士学位，2020年获得香港科技大学社会科学哲学硕士学位，2024年博士毕业于香港大学经管学院。主要研究方向为发展经济学、政治经济学、公共经济学、经济史。论文发表于Journal of Development Economics，Journal of Economic History，Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization，Economic History Review等期刊。
欢迎感兴趣的师生参加
校对|罗 唯
责编| 彭 毅
初审| 李仲达
终审发布| 何凌云
（来源：暨南大学经济学院微信公众号）
