Abstract
China’s in-depth promotion of economic system reform needs to achieve the coordination and balance among the relationships of enterprises, market and government. As seen from the progress of current overall economic system reform, reforms in enterprises and market have achieved relatively large progress but government administration system reform has lagged far behind and become the largest weakness through the formation of micro-basis and construction of market system in the previous reforms. Such lag and containment has led to the sticky situation of reform in the monopolizing industries, market reforms in land, capital and other elements, reform in revenue distribution system as well as the reforms in other key areas and important links, and some reforms are even in the state of “progress or regression”. This needs to “offset the weakness” as soon as possible and seek the breakthrough progress in the administration system reform. The core of government administration system reform is the transformation of government functions, which is to achieve the transformation of government function orientation from the economic construction to public services. Currently, government at all levels is still relatively prominent in the constructive characteristics and faces many institutional obstacles in the transformation to the service-oriented government. In the next stage, only conducting deeper institutional reform may achieve the breakthrough in the transformation of government functions.
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Notes
- 1.
Oi (1992).
- 2.
The judgement is made based on the weight of national finance used for educational expenditure in GDP. The weight of national finance used for educational expenses (mainly including public finance budget for educational expenditure, taxes collected by government at all levels for education, enterprise appropriation in the enterprise-run schools, school-run industries and social service revenue used for educational expenses) in GDP was 4.3 % in 2013, slightly exceeding 4 %.
- 3.
In addition, some other scholars also conducted the studies on the principles of taxation division. Such as: Mintz proposed five principles, including efficiency (taxation division shall minimize the impacts on resource optimization allocation), simplicity (taxation system shall be simplified to facilitate the understanding and implementation of the public), flexibility (taxation division shall be conducive to the flexible application of budgetary expenditure, tax subsidies and a series policy instruments by government at all levels so as to achieve the adaptability of taxation and authority), responsibility (expenditure and taxation responsibility of government at all levels shall be coordinated) and fairness (tax structure, tax base and tax rate across the country shall be balanced, namely, the tax bearing of residents nationwide shall be balanced). Boadway et al. proposed six principles, that is, revenue tax is related to the fairness of the whole society and shall be put under the administration by the central government; related capital tax, property transfer tax and other taxes shall be put under the administration by the central government in order to ensure the formation of the national unified market as well as the free flow and optimization allocation of resources nationwide; the weighing between goals of fairness and efficiency related to resource taxation shall be shared by the central and local government; non-liquidity taxation is the ideal source of revenue by municipal government administrated by regions; social security tax, as the beneficial tax, can be jointly collected and administrated by the central and local government; value-added tax and sales tax which are collected in many links shall be put under the administration by the central government, but single sales tax and retail sales tax are more appropriate to be put under the administration by the local government. Seligman proposed three principles: the first is the principle of efficiency, that is, the division of inter-governmental revenue shall take taxation efficiency as the standard; the second is the principle of adaptation, that is, the division of inter-governmental revenue shall take width of tax base as the standard, taxes with wide tax base and narrow tax base can be respectively allocated to the central and local government; and the third is the principle of appropriateness, that is, division of inter-governmental revenue shall take fairness of tax burden as the standard.
- 4.
- 5.
See Zhou Li’an (2007).
- 6.
In fact, government does not necessarily adopt the way of expropriation if the government needs to use the non-state-owned land even if for the needs of public benefits. In some countries, such as Australia, the government may also use the non-state-owned land through the ways of leasing (with the leasing period from 1 to 100 years) and agreement, etc. For the sequence and frequency of different ways in use, lease is the generally preferred way; land expropriation by force is only the last approach for the government to acquire the non-state-owned land and seldom used in reality (see Dou Hong 2006).
- 7.
Currently, a viewpoint believes that a part of market value of land is brought by the infrastructure of government. Therefore, taking market value as the standard for compensation is unreasonable. In fact, it is also the belonging issue of land value-added revenue due to the external factors (including the economic and social development as well as the change in land use), namely, “the belonging of appreciation” to the public or the private. In this regard, at least two points shall be clarified: first, government may regulate the adjustment in value of land brought by the construction of infrastructure through the taxation instrument instead of directly participating in the allocation of appreciation earnings. Second, government shall follow the principle of “taking from the people, giving back to the people”, if the government does need to use such earnings, mainly for the public purposes but not for satisfying its own interests.
- 8.
From an international point of view, many countries introduced the measurement and evaluation mechanism to the satisfaction with public services to evaluate the quality of services by the public sectors in order to establish the government with the orientation of meeting the public needs, in emerging government re-construction movement.
- 9.
- 10.
In addition, public institutions are generally more suitable to meet the needs with relatively high homogeneity, while non-government profit institutions have relative large advantages in suiting the needs of heterogeneity.
- 11.
In addition to contract supervision mechanism, it also needs to work with the price regulation and the regulation which ensures the effective and fair competition under necessary circumstances. In particular, for the incomplete information and information asymmetry, it is also necessary to strengthen the social regulation in some field and link, such as the regulation to quality of services.
- 12.
Theories and practice show that private participation is conducive to promoting the general services on the whole, including expanding the coverage scope of service supply, reducing the service costs and price (in the mid and long-term) through innovating the supply technology, service models and enhancement in efficiency, changing the quality of services and improving the response ability of users to different needs, etc.
- 13.
Object of competition can be the minimum subsidy required for the provision of services; and the government supervises the specific service standards, or carries out the bidding for some service standards under the circumstance of fixed subsidies.
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Zhang, X., Chang, X. (2016). Better Play the Role of the Government: Reconstruction of the Government Functions. In: The Logic of Economic Reform in China. China Insights. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-47404-4_9
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