TITLE:
Understanding Governmental Spending on Public Cultural Services: Exploring the Effects of Fiscal Decentralization Variables
AUTHORS:
Bin Tu, Xiangyu Tao, Nian’en Guo
KEYWORDS:
Government Spending, Public Culture Services, Fiscal Decentralization, Promotion Tournament
JOURNAL NAME:
Theoretical Economics Letters,
Vol.7 No.4,
May
17,
2017
ABSTRACT: This article explores the fiscal decentralization
factors that affect government spending on public culture services in two main
points—imbalance
in revenue power and spending responsibility and promotion tournament by using
provincial panel data from 1997 to 2015 in China. The results yield three
noteworthy findings. First, fiscal decentralization in spending responsibility
significantly reduced the proportion of government spending on public cultural
services to government spending. The public financial self-sufficiency has a
significant positive effect on the ratio of public cultural expenditure and
public spending. Second, the coefficient of transfer payment is significantly
negative, namely, the current transfer payment in China cannot increase the
proportion of public cultural expenditure effectively. Third, the coefficient
of government official promotion competition has also a significantly negative effect on public cultural
spending. This research contributes to the literature in several ways, most
notably by incorporating a more open-systems approach to the study of government
spending on public culture services with the inclusion of several fiscal decentralization
variables.