【主讲】章奇 副教授 (复旦大学经济学院)
【主题】Policy Choice and Economic Growth under Factional Politics: Evidence from a Chinese Province
【时间】2012年11月5日 (周一) 15：30-17：00
【地点】上海财经大学经济学院楼602室
【语言】英文
【摘要】This paper investigates how political elites make policy choices bearing on economy under an authoritarian regime, from the perspective of factional politics. A local leader makes policies primarily to secure his political survival, which is contingent on the protection from higher-level patrons, or on the support from his local grassroots constituents. In a simple model, we show that a local leader with close factional tie to the patrons at higher level will invest more on signaling his loyalty, while a poorly-connected one will make more efforts on spurring a broad-based economic growth to benefits his local constituents economically. Using county level data on factional politics of Zhejiang Province, China, we find that counties with weaker factional tie have lower tax burdens per capita, while spend more on local public goods provision, among others education. And the results are stable after various robustness tests.
