This article explores the nature of China's land-use rights system, its evolution and impact on resource allocation and local governments' public finances. In recent decades, the public ownership of land has not hindered the development of a thriving market economy. Since the inception of the...

The heavy reliance of Chinese local governments on land-leasing revenues in recent decades has attracted widespread criticism due to its potential risks and problems. This research, using a panel dataset of 280 prefecture-level cities in China from 1999-2009, explores what factors affect Chinese...

Facing a substantial loss of farmland in the reform era, the Chinese central government established a highly centralized land management system in 1998 to guarantee its capacity to meet the domestic food needs. In order to maintain high-speed economic growth, local governments in China made...

This study is the first attempt to examine the determinants of expenditure decentralization at sub-provincial levels in China. The Chinese central government gives detailed guidelines to local governments on public finance, but, ironically, their expenditure assignment is far from being...

Pay-as-you-go (pay-go or cash) and pay-as-you-use (pay-use or debt) are two mechanisms to finance capital projects. While pay-go faces multiple constraints, pay-use smoothes outlays, stabilizes tax rates, and improves inter-generational equity. Thus, pay-use has dominated infrastructure...

This paper investigates the determinants of government size at the provincial level in China. We employ the panel data model as a platform for empirical analysis and control for endogeneity in the study. Our study shows that openness to trade and foreign direct investment (FDI) may curtail...

The temporal persistence and geographical prevalence of corruption in the world have provoked a vast amount of research into its causes. Low civil service remuneration, especially in less developed nations, is believed to be an important contributing factor to corruption. The assumption is that...

The extent to which social protection programs in general and targeted programs in particular actually alleviate poverty has been a central issue in development debates for decades. The objective of this paper is to contribute to the debate by empirically examining the poverty-alleviation...

Using a nationwide county-level panel dataset for the years 1995-2009, this paper conducts the rst analysis in the literature to examine the impacts of scal decentralization and scal equalization, both measured at the sub-provincial level, on intra-provincial inequality in China. While scal...

The extent to which social protection programs in general and targeted programs in particular actually alleviate poverty has been a central issue in development debates for decades. The objective of this paper is to contribute to the debate by empirically examining the poverty-alleviation...