摘要
财政信息公开透明是现代财政制度的基本特征之一,其对收入分配格局的影响尚有待研究。本文采用中国城市层面的数据,系统考察了地方政府财政透明度对城乡收入差距的影响及其作用机制。研究发现,地方政府财政透明度的提升显著缩小了城乡收入差距,该结论在经过一系列稳健性检验后仍然成立。机制检验表明,遏制腐败和缓解财政支出的城市偏向性是地方财政透明度影响城乡收入差距的两个核心机制。异质性分析表明,财政透明度对城乡收入差距的抑制效应在媒体报道量较少和市场化程度较低的城市更为显著。进一步分析发现,财政透明度对城乡收入差距的抑制效应表现出明显的“雪中送炭”特征,且对降低城镇居民内部收入差距具有积极作用。本文从城乡收入分配的角度揭示了财政信息公开与城乡收入分配公平的关联特征和影响机制,为政府提升财政透明度以优化收入分配格局提供了理论参考。
Govermment information disclosure ensures and safeguards public rights to information,supervision,and participation.Its inherent equity characteristics provide crucial institutional foundations for equitable income distribution.However,existing literature predominantly focuses on its economic eficiency implications while neglecting its redistributive effects,thereby underestimating its intrinsic faimess attributes and offering incomplete insights into its socioeconomic consequences.Concurrently,despite the income growth of both urban and rural residents in China over the past decade,the urban-rural income gap remains significantly higher than that of major global economies,constituting the most critical challenge in China's income distribution landscape.In response,this paper,from the perspective of the transparency of local government fiscal information,uses city-level data in China from 2013 to 2023 to empirically examine the impact of local govermment fiscal transparency on the urban-rural income gap and its underlying mechanisms.The findings of this paper mainly cover three aspects.First,enhanced fiscal transparency significantly increases rural per capita income without notable impacts on urban residents,thereby reducing the urban-rural income gap.Second,corruption mitigation and alleviation of fiscal urban bias constitute dual mechanisms through which fiscal transparency optimizes income distribution,with heterogeneous effects being more pronounced in cities with limited media coverage and underdeveloped marketization.Third,the inequality-reducing effect of fiscal transparency demonstrates pro-poor characteristics while simultaneously narrowing intra-urban income disparities.Based on these findings,this paper proposes policy implications including legal institutionalization of fiscal transparency,enhancement of disclosure comprehensiveness and timeliness,and strategic utilization of fiscal transparency as an auxiliary tool to ensure effective implementation of rural development policies.This paper makes three marginal contributions.First,it substantiates the academic proposition that"transparency promotes fairness"by investigating the relationship between fiscal transparency and the urban-rural income gap,providing novel empirical evidence on the distributive effects of government information disclosure.Second,it re-examines the dynamic mechanisms of China's urban-rural income gap from the perspective of information disclosure,elucidating unique pathways through which fiscal transparency reduces inequality by combating corruption and alleviating fiscal urban bias,thereby offering valuable insights for future research on inequality determinants and containment strategies.Third,based on the existing consensus that"transparency enhances eficiency',this paper systematically clarifies how fiscal transparency concurrently promotes both eficiency and distributional equity,contributing new theoretical explanations and empirical evidence for balancing efficiency-equity relations in incomedistribution.
作者
雷卓骏
刘晔
LEI Zhuojun;LIU Ye(School of Economics,Xiamen University)
出处
《中国农村经济》
北大核心
2025年第6期81-100,共20页
Chinese Rural Economy
基金
国家社会科学基金项目“新发展理念下我国环境税的政策效应评估及深化改革研究”(编号:22BJY132)。
关键词
政府信息收入分配
财政透明度
城乡收入差距
共同富裕
Govemment Infomation
Income Distribution
Fiscal Transparency
Urban-Rural Income Gap
Common Prosperity
