Causes of China's Low Consumption from the Perspective of Local Governmental Competition

Abstract

Taking into account the three-sector general equilibrium perspective of the government, business, and household sectors and taking government public goods investment as intermediary; this article builds mathematical models of local governmental competition and three-sector consumption. It also theoretically analyzes the impacting path of local governmental competition, causing increased investment in public goods, thereby reducing consumption. At the same time, based on the model of China's provincial panel data from 1993 to 2015, the empirical analysis shows that a 1% increase in the level of competition among local governments will result in a corresponding decrease of 0.757% in total consumption, 0.348% in governmental competition, 0.340% in business consumption and 0.366% in household consumption. Local governmental competition leads to the government's tendency to invest in public goods and reduces the regional consumption, which especially damages the consumption capacity of the household sector.