减税政策与地方政府债务——来自增值税税率下调的证据  

Tax Cut Policy and Local Government Debt:Evidence from China’s VAT Cut

作　　者：张牧扬[1] 潘妍 范莹莹 ZHANG Muyang;PAN Yan;FAN Yingying(China Public Finance Institute,Shanghai University of Finance and Economics;School of Public Economics and Administration,Shanghai University of Finance and Economics)

机构地区：[1]上海财经大学中国公共财政研究院,200433 [2]上海财经大学公共经济与管理学院,200433

出　　处：《经济研究》2022年第3期118-135,共18页Economic Research Journal

基　　金：中央高校基本科研业务费项目(2019110249);上海财经大学研究生创新基金项目(CXJJ-2020-318)资助。

摘　　要：2017年以来,中国采取了力度空前的增值税税率下调政策,切实降低了企业税收负担,但也不免引发社会各界对地方政府财政可持续性的担忧。本文基于2017—2019年中国192个地级市财政预决算数据,以城投债为切入点,检验了增值税税率下调是否引发地方政府债务膨胀,即“李嘉图等价定理”描述的“税债替代”现象是否存在。研究发现,增值税税率下调非但没有促进地方政府债务膨胀,反而对其有抑制作用。这主要与税收对地方政府债务形成的“担保效应”有关。“担保效应”主导下,税债之间形成了互补关系,即“李嘉图等价定理”在中国地方政府层面并不成立。本文研究结论表明,较之过分担心减税引致地方政府债务风险上升,现阶段更需关注地方财政收支失衡可能引发的财政风险问题。Risks of mounting local government debt has been a central issue of concern by both the central government of China and the financial market since the mid-2010s.Prevention and mitigation of local government debt risk was reiterated in March 2021 by the State Council as a key task in the near future.Around the same time,China implemented a series of tax-cut policies,among which value-added tax(VAT)rate cut was a most salient one.As a major tax in China,VAT accounts for one-third of the total tax revenue.The VAT rate for most products was 17%from 1994 to early 2018,and was reduced to 16%in May 2018,then to 13%in April 2019.The unprecedented VAT cut not only helped save taxpayers amid economic slowdown,but also caused pressure on the fiscal budget.Therefore,worries arose that local governments might expand their debt levels to achieve the financial balance,as predicted by the classic Ricardian equivalence theorem.In this paper,we empirically investigate how VAT cut affected local government debt level in Chinese prefectures based on information in initial and final annual fiscal budgets as well as data of urban investment bonds of 192 prefectural-level cities during 2017—2019.Since VAT cut policies were announced and implemented in the middle of each year,that is,after the initial fiscal budget had been passed,we compose an index of municipal VAT dependency in the initial fiscal budgets to measure the intensity of revenue loss due to VAT cut which could not be taken into account in the initial fiscal budgets.We also notice that the four-trillion plan after the 2008 global financial crisis resulted in a substantial expansion of local government debts,and the period of VAT cut coincided with the period of maturity of these debts.Therefore,we construct the index of net issuance of local government debt to measure the change of local government debt more accurately.Empirical evidence shows that prefectures which were more VAT-dependent and thus more heavily affected by VAT cut policies saw slight decrease in net urban

关 键 词：增值税税率下调 税债替代 担保效应 财政可持续性 

分 类 号：F812.42[经济管理—财政学] F812.5