An Empirical Study On The Influence Of The Characteristics Of Prefecture-level Leadership Collectives On Education Fiscal Expenditures

Since the Tax-sharing reform in 1994,China has formed a unique fiscal decentralization system.The institutional design of political centralization and economic decentralization has made local governments face unique incentives and constraints.Local governments with greater discretion can adjust the structure of fiscal expenditure according to local needs and promote economic development;however,local governments are subject to the "top-down" personnel appointment and removal systeru and the "emphasizing economy but ignoring service,assessment system.The local government's fiscal expenditure behavior is inevitably affected by the preference of officials.The vertical imbalance of governlent financial powers makes local government expenditure preferences more prominent in the public goods supply process.Considering that under the principle of democratic centralism,China's local governments widely use the model that decisions are made by the collective and the responsibility is borne by the chief executive of the governance,and the in-depth interpretation of China's local governance characteristics needs to explore the influence of local government leadership in the supply of local public goods.Through the collection and processing of the information of the members of the Standing Committee of the Party Committees national in 2015,this study constructs a collective characteristic database of the party committees of the prefecture-level party committees,and combines the educational expenditures and social and economic development data to construct multivariate linear regression models.It not only analyzes the influence of the collective characteristics of prefecture-level leaders on the financial expenditure of education,but also compares and analyzes the similarities and differences between the leadership collectives and individuals.It also further explores the relative contribution rate of the characteristics of the leadership collectives through the calculation of the R-square change.Responding to three key issues:"Does the prefecture-level leadership collectively have a significant impact on the fiscal expenditure of education?",What are the similarities and differences between the prefecture-level leadership and local political elites in the impact of education and financial expenditures?",“How much impact does it have of fiscal expenditures?".Thus,reveal the logic of the influence of local government leadership in the supply of local public goods.The results of this study show that the prefecture-level leadership has an impact on the fiscal expenditure of education,and the impact is different from that of the political elite.The influence of the characteristics of the collectives of the party committees at the prefecture level is different.Based on the empirical conclusions,this study points out that the rational expenditure and effective governance of local government education financial expenditures need to adhere to the democratic centralized decision-making of education and financial expenditures,increase the support and supervision of education finance in poverty-stricken areas,strengthen the financial accountability of education,improve the local development performance evaluation methods,and raise the attention to local leadership collective composition and decision-making behavior in the education and financial reform.