[go: up one dir, main page]

IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/publus/v49y2019i4p694-718..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Transfer-Based Decentralization and Poverty Alleviation: Evidence from a Quasi-Experiment in China

Author

Listed:
  • Fubing Su
  • Ming Li
  • Ran Tao
Abstract
China launched a massive poverty alleviation program in the 1990s that focused on nationally designated poverty counties. By injecting earmarked transfers with clear spending mandates, the central government hoped for major investments in productive capacities in the poverty counties so they could develop sustainably. Comparing fiscal data of county governments through a regression discontinuity approach, we show that the opposite was true. Poverty county officials failed to make extra investments in production-oriented areas while diversion of central transfers for administrative consumption was rampant. This article develops a better empirical strategy to challenge some earlier findings. Theoretically, this article offers a different case of elite capture under a non-democratic regime. Our focus on poverty regions also reveals the importance of maintaining bureaucratic support in local politics. It complements the popular notion that Chinese local officials are mostly geared toward growth.

Suggested Citation

  • Fubing Su & Ming Li & Ran Tao, 2019. "Transfer-Based Decentralization and Poverty Alleviation: Evidence from a Quasi-Experiment in China," Publius: The Journal of Federalism, CSF Associates Inc., vol. 49(4), pages 694-718.
  • Handle: RePEc:oup:publus:v:49:y:2019:i:4:p:694-718.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/publius/pjy044
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Vassilis Tselios & Andres Rodriguez-Pose, 2022. "Can decentralisation help address poverty and social exclusion in Europe?," Papers in Evolutionary Economic Geography (PEEG) 2212, Utrecht University, Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Group Economic Geography, revised Jul 2022.
    2. Tselios, Vassilis & Rodriguez-Pose, Andres, 2022. "Can decentralization help address poverty and social exclusion in Europe?," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 115545, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    3. Kosec, Katrina & Song, Jie & Zhao, Hongdi, 2021. "Bringing Power to the People or the Well-Connected? Evidence from Ethiopia on the Gendered Effects of Decentralizing Service Delivery," 2021 Conference, August 17-31, 2021, Virtual 315258, International Association of Agricultural Economists.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:publus:v:49:y:2019:i:4:p:694-718.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/publius .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.