Research On The Distribution Of Intergovernmental Power Allocation, Target-oriented Governance And Regional Economic Growth Performance

China’s regional economic growth exhibits some characteristics of “strong intervention, high growth, and low quality” from regional government, which brings many a puzzle to the academia and theorists present a concept of “the myth of China’s economic growth” to this phenomenon. Focused on the doubts and considerations on the characteristics of China’s regional economic growth as mentioned above, this dissertation, based on the review of the correlated literature about the explanations of regional economic growth and the pre-survey in practice, discovered that the vertical factors in intergovernmental governance nested in the context of the relationship between the central and local governments might have a great influence on the actions of the local government and as a result, the actions of the local government are more likely to affect the performance of the regional economic growth. Based on the above observation, this dissertation focuses on three research questions: 1. What are the factors in the intergovernmental governance that influence the regional economic growth? 2. Through what mechanism of inner link do the factors function to influence the performance of regional economic growth? 3. On what degree do the factors influence the performance of regional economic growth?In the hope to answer the above three questions, this dissertation takes intergovernmental target-oriented governance as explanatory variable, the structure of the intergovernmental power allocation as moderator variable, the behavior model of local economic growth as intermediary variable, and the performance of regional economic growth as explained variable and adopts a mixed research method of qualitative and quantitative. Based on the preliminary conclusion through the in-depth comparative study on the cases of the regional economic growth in three counties/city and the sample questionnaires to 208 in-service county committee secretaries, county heads, secretaries of township, and township heads, this dissertation discovered, through the conclusions on the quantitative empirical analysis, that the models of intergovernmental target-oriented governance developed from the target-oriented responsibility system between governments at all levels since the reform and opening policy have remarkable influence on the performance of regional economic growth and furthermore, the existed influence is regulated by the allocation of intergovernmental power and functions through the behavior models of the local economic growth. Meanwhile, the allocation of intergovernmental power itself has influence on the regional economic growth to some extent, but comparing with the direct influence from the intergovernmental target-oriented governance, the latter mostly functions through its regulations between the model of intergovernmental target-oriented governance and the performance of the regional economic growth. The findings in this research clearly define the functional mechanism of intergovernmental power allocation to the regional economic growth. In addition, the explanatory variable—the intergovernmental target-oriented governance includes two dimensions: Factor of intergovernmental target tasks and factor of intergovernmental goal incentives, which supplies the gap of the explanation deficiencies of a single dimension by employing explanatory variable as political centralization, official career management, or official promotion incentive in explaining China’s economy, reflects from a more practical perspective the governance process of promoting the regional economic growth under the pressure of intergovernmental target-oriented governance and embodies the mechanisms of behavior and binding system in local government’s promoting the regional economic growth. An abstract of a dissertation is a summary and extraction of research work and contributions. Included in an abstract should be description of research topic and research objective, brief introduction to methodology and research process, and summarization of conclusion and contributions of the research. An abstract should be characterized by independence and clarity and carry identical information with the dissertation. It should be such that the general idea and major contributions of the dissertation are conveyed without reading the dissertation.