This paper is an attempt to present an analysis of China's decentralization and local governance practices, the dilemmas rooted in the current institution. We argue that the misbehavior of local government officials is endogenous to China's central-local structure and that competition among...

The present paper examines the historical evolution of China's rural taxation system from the pre-reform period to the late 1990s. We propose that because of information asymmetry between the upper-level and the lower-level governments, local governments had to be granted some informal tax...