| "Risk prevention" and "stable growth" are the two important goals that China needs to balance in building a high-quality economic development society,while preventing local government debt risks and implementing innovation-driven development strategies are two extremely important aspects of the two goals.At present,the problem of local government debt has become a problem that all sectors of society in China pay close attention to,after the active fiscal policy in 2008,local debt swelled rapidly,coupled with the outbreak of the epidemic in20 years,in order to resume work and production and steady growth,China issued3.75 trillion yuan of "Anti-epidemic special debt",and the scale of local government debt came to an unprecedented high.Innovation is the first driving force for high-quality economic development,China has put the innovation development strategy in the first position of the overall development,it can be seen that innovation is important for the current development of our country,but there are still many problems in China’s regional innovation activities,innovation resource misallocation,innovation activity financing constraints are too strong,innovation factors are not evenly distributed,how to improve China’s regional innovation ability,is also the focus of current academic attention in China.Local government debt has a non-negligible impact on economic development,and regional economic development will have an impact on regional innovation ability,but by combing through previous literature,it is found that the empirical research combining the two is very limited.In this context,this paper focuses on the relationship between local government debt and regional innovation ability,and introduces a new debt ratio measurement method,the generalized debt ratio,to measure regional debt pressure from the perspective of government fiscal revenue,and study the empirical relationship between generalized debt of local government debt and regional innovation.According to the different debt structures,the explicit and implicit debts are empirically analyzed to obtain the influence mechanism under the heterogeneity of the debt structure.Therefore,this paper uses the panel data of 30 provinces(excluding Tibet)from 2012 to 2021,uses the fixed-effect model to conduct empirical regression analysis,and finally concludes:(1)The generalized debt ratio of China’s local debt has a restraining effect on regional innovation,whether it is explicit debt or hidden debt.(2)Compared with the broad debt ratio of hidden debt,explicit debt has a stronger inhibitory effect on regional innovation.In response to the above conclusions,this paper also puts forward corresponding policy recommendations,which are mainly manifested in two aspects:(1)resolving existing debts.China’s current debt scale is too large,and hidden debt accounts for more than 50%,hidden debt due to low transparency,there is no unified statistical caliber,so this paper suggests that it is divided into 4 steps to resolve the huge hidden debt scale of local governments: first,make a clear definition of hidden debt,find out the existing scale of hidden debt,interest rate term structure;Then,the risk of existing hidden debt is transferred and resolved through a series of means such as debt replacement;This is followed by the improvement of the debt monitoring mechanism;Finally,it is necessary to accelerate the reform of the fiscal system.(2)Rational use of future debt.In the past,China’s debt funds were more invested in infrastructure construction,but now that China’s infrastructure is increasingly perfect,we should make more reasonable use of local debts and invest funds in areas that can promote regional innovation capabilities. |
