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In recent years, to address the sluggish domestic demand caused by the epidemic, consumption has declined. The General Office of the State Council has introduced a series of policy measures around the improvement and development of the housing rental market. The paper empirically investigates the influence mechanism of the development of the housing rental market on residents' consumption using relevant data from the 2010–2019 City Statistical Yearbook and the Xi Tai database. It is found that the increase in the scale of housing rentals significantly raises the level of residents' consumption. Specifically, the increase in the scale of housing rentals can increase government expenditure, firm up residents' consumption confidence, and thus raise residents' consumption level; urban labor inflow plays a negative moderating role in the development of the housing rental market to promote residents' consumption level. The heterogeneity study shows that the improvement and development of the housing rental market in the eastern coastal region has a more significant role in promoting residents' consumption level, while it is not significant for residents' consumption level in the central and western regions. The study suggests that to release the vitality of residents' consumption, government spending should be increased, the impact of inflowing labor on the labor market should be reduced, and the development of the housing rental market should be improved and nurtured. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper examines the dynamic relationship between liquefied natural gas (LNG) price, LNG revenue, non-LNG revenue and government spending (GOVS) in China using autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) and structural vector auto-regressive (SVAR) model. The goal of carrying out ARDL and SVAR together is to consolidate and strengthen the consistency of the results obtained from both approaches. ARDL results show that a positive influence relationship between both short-run and long-run LNG prices, LNG revenue, non-LNG revenue and GOVS, but there was no significant relationship between LNG price and GOVS. The SVAR also substantiates the results of ARDL test and provides further insight which shows that long-run fiscal synchronization hypothesis is evidenced between the LNG revenue and GOVS, while spend-tax hypothesis exists in the long-run between GOVS and non-LNG revenue. It is also evidenced that there is a complementary relationship between LNG revenue and non-LNG revenue, but this complementary role is stronger than the substitution role. Since non-LNG revenue has a greater impact on GOVS in the short-run, and the impact of LNG prices and LNG revenue on GOVS in the long-run increases over time, thus, GOVS mitigates the direct impact of non-LNG revenue to some extent, and that an appropriate allocation of spending in the non-LNG industry will have a positive impact on the development of the market economy supporting the Keynesian and spend-tax hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A fundamental aspect of China's transition to a market economy is the change in fiscal decentralization marked by the tax reform in 1993. This paper examines the effect of revenue and expenditure decentralization and their divergences on fiscal spending multipliers in China using nationally aggregate and provincial-level data from 1978 to 2017. Our investigations show that expenditure decentralization weakens the efficacy of spending policies, while revenue decentralization enhances the efficacy. Moreover, the divergence of revenue and expenditure decentralization has significantly decreased the provincial spending multiplier, while its effect on the aggregate spending multiplier is insignificant. The provincial results are robust to the inclusion of off-budgetary expenditure and revenue, using different estimates of multipliers and different measures of fiscal decentralization, considering from a long-run perspective, and addressing the endogeneity issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By providing public service for equity and reducing the investment gap between rich and poor children, government spending plays a crucial role in intergenerational income mobility. With the China Health and Nutrition Survey data from 1989 to 2015, this paper assessed the relationship between government spending and intergenerational income mobility in China. First, we found that there was greater intergenerational mobility in high-spending provinces compared with low-spending provinces. Second, children with high per-capita government spending were more likely to experience upward mobility; this effect was twice as common in urban areas compared with rural areas. Third, government spending exerted influence on intergenerational income mobility through the mediation of education expansion. Higher government spending, which brought better quality in primary and secondary education, benefited poorer families more. In underdeveloped provinces, especially rural areas, government spending aimed at equal distribution of public services may provide more opportunities for the poor and lead to greater intergenerational income mobility in the future. Finally, the robustness checks that supported changing how income was measured or how government spending occurred did nothing to change our findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using data from China Annual Survey of Industrial Firms and addressing potential endogeneity problem, we find that corporate tax burden in China is procyclical during recessions and countercyclical during booms. The cyclicality is stronger for enterprises whose corporate income taxes are levied by Local Tax Bureau (LTB). Procyclicality of corporate tax burden during recessions is larger for enterprises located in county, non‐state‐owned enterprises (non‐SOEs), non‐high‐tech enterprises and large‐medium enterprises. Furthermore, tax quotas and growth targets of local governments enhance procyclicality during recessions and the countercyclicality of corporate tax burden during booms. Tax collection and government spending are important channels through which tax quotas and growth targets affect the cyclicality of corporate tax burden, respectively. This paper provides important policy implications for China during economic recessions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the long-run and short-run impacts of government spending on inflation in three Asian emerging economies of India, China and Indonesia by applying the cointegration and Vector Error Correction Model to time series data from 1970 to 2010. The results confirm a cointegrating causal link between government spending and inflation in the long run in these countries, regardless of their institutional governance differences. In the short run, government spending (as a percentage of GDP) appears to have a negative impact on inflation in China, while a positive impact in Indonesia and India. The implication is that governments of emerging economies should be prudent with their decisions on government spending. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study empirically examines how the bank specific factors, macro-economic, and institutional variables impact interest margins in China's banking sector. A panel data analysis of bank data for the period 1988-2015 was carried out. We found a significant association between credit quality, risk aversion, liquidity risk, and the proportion of corporate and industrial loans and the adjusted interest spread (AIS). GDP growth rate, inflation, and the proportion of national savings to the GDP were found to have significant association with the AIS. Furthermore, institutional variables were found to have a significant moderating effect on the AIS. We contribute to the literature by examining a unique context and a more accurate measure of bank interest margin not used in prior studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we analyze how fiscal decentralization affects the cyclicality of government spending. We focus on China, which experienced fiscal decentralization during 1979-1993 and then partly centralized its revenue with the 1994 fiscal reform. By employing both time series and province-level panel data, we show that Chinese provincial and total government spending was strongly procyclical during the decentralization period before the reform, but both became significantly less procyclical with respect to nationwide output fluctuations after the reform. We suggest several channels through which the procyclicality of subnational government spending in decentralized fiscal federations could be restrained. We further find that less procyclical provincial government spending is associated with smaller output volatility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study pays attention to a rarely discussed but important issue regarding the influence of the government's environmental protection expenditure on Sulfur Dioxide (SO 2 ) emissions in China under consideration of the potentially spatial dependence of SO 2 emissions. A panel dataset of 30 provinces from 2008 to 2013 is utilized to estimate the panel Spatial Durbin models. The main findings of this study are that SO 2 emissions can be effectively reduced by government spending on environmental protection and that the relationship between SO 2 emissions and gross regional product (GRP) per capita in China is cubic polynomial (N-shaped). In addition, as direct investment from foreign countries toward China increases, SO 2 emissions will be reduced. The trade factor also plays an important and negative role in SO 2 emissions. Provinces with higher shares of secondary industries to total GRP will have more SO 2 emissions. The investment completed in the treatment of industrial pollution in the private sector can effectively reduce SO 2 emissions, and a higher population density causes a reduction in SO 2 emissions. The coefficient of spatial autocorrelation ρ is statistically positive, confirming a positive spatial correlation (also meaning a spatial competition) of SO 2 emissions among provinces in China. All these conclusions are consistent with those in previous works and with our expectations, and remain the same while a two-stage procedure is applied to cope with the potential endogeneity problem of GRP, with the exception of the effect of population density. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the introduction of 15-year free education in Macau and several provinces in Mainland China in recent years, a heated debate has broken out in Hong Kong over the proposal of providing free pre-primary education in addition to the existing 12-year free education at primary and secondary levels. A sea of different views has been voiced via various media since 2010 and the debate persists. In an attempt to help reconcile the ceaseless debate, this study was executed to delineate the major reasons, arguments, and concerns put forth by different parties in the debate. To this end, a set of online content analyses was conducted. The findings suggested that members of the community tended to support the implementation of 15-year free education, but several fundamental issues have been neglected by the supporting party and addressing these issues would be imperative. In light of the present findings, this study has identified the common interests shared by the supporters and opponents of the proposal which could offer a new light to understanding this debate. It is hoped that the findings and discussion could provide insights into how the issues concerned could be resolved, and in the long run, contribute to the development of pre-primary education in Hong Kong. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chinese fiscal reforms in the past decade have recentralized government revenues, making lower governments more dependent on central and provincial funds. At the same time, decentralization in spending has obliged the county governments to take primary responsibility for financing compulsory education. That vertical imbalance can lead to widening regional gap in education if the central government does not carry out effective redistributive fiscal transfers. This paper examines a data set that includes all the counties of mainland China from 1997 through 2001 and finds that regional economic and budgetary disparities did carry over to education spending. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aims: How the Chinese government controls the Covid-19 epidemic? This paper aims to answer this question from the perspective of public health expenditure, and policy, and then to help the government to perform better in infectious disease prevention and public health emergency management., Methods and Materials: We reviewed the development phases of the COVID-19 epidemic in China and divided it into four stages (incubation stage, outbreak stage, resolution stage, and stable stage). Then we adopted a content analysis method via MAXQDA2020, to analyze the combined application of four different types of policy tools in different stages with 571 texts of epidemic governance policy from the Chinese central government. We also calculated and compared the Chinese public health expenditure between epidemic and non-epidemic periods. Moreover, we also discussed implications for public health emergency management and for infectious disease prevention and control in China., Results: (1) in the incubation stage, the potential epidemic has not attracted enough attention from the government; (2) the combination of the 4 types of policies is not only an important reason in controlling epidemic during the outbreak stage and resolution stage, but also the reason why the small-scale epidemic has not expanded in the stable stage; (3) the increasing Chinese public health expenditure, involving public health emergency treatment (114.81 billion yuan), government hospitals (284.84 billion yuan) and major public health service projects (45.33 billion yuan), is another critical reason for the rapid control of the epidemic., Conclusion and Implications: Public health expenditure and policy played an important role in the governance and control of the COVID-19 epidemic in China. Some limitations of China's infectious disease prevention system and public health emergency management system have been exposed to the public in this epidemic, which the Chinese government needs to improve in the future.

With rapid economic growth, the Chinese government expenditures at various levels have increased adequately. At the same time, the environmental quality in China has deteriorated significantly. In this study, provincial-level data for 31 Chinese provinces during 2007-2017 are used to investigate the impacts of government expenditure on the emissions of three specific measures of environmental degradation. The main objective of this study is to examine the influence of government expenditures, economic growth per capita, environment protection expenditure, and added second-sector value on environmental quality by measuring sulfur dioxide (SO 2 ), chemical oxygen demand (COD), and ammonia nitrogen emissions (AN). Moreover, the study applied the generalized method of moments (GMM) and the fully modified least square (FMOLS) to estimate the co-integration relationship among the underlying factors. The results demonstrate a significant direct effect of government expenditure on improving environmental quality overall in the Chinese provinces, which increases with the level of economic growth. However, the results also confirmed the inverted N-shaped relationship between the pollution factor and economic growth per capita. Our key findings lead toward the manifestation and emphasis of the importance of appropriate policies for restoring government expenditure and, at the same time, strengthening the relationship between the industrial sector and environmental policy standards. Significantly, governments in developing countries should allocate larger budgets for environmental projects in their fiscal reforms for the sake of moving to greener and more inclusive economies with low-carbon activities.