Government debt and fiscal execution efficiency

Abstract

Governments have used deficit policies in recent years, yet many still face fiscal debt problems. Thus, this research uses Range Directional Measure Dynamic Directional Distance Function model with negative data to explore the financial efficiency of local governments in Taiwan from 2011 to 2018. This article has three major contributions: (1) The research uses RDM Dynamic DDF model with negative data to solve the problem of negative values on input and output data and uses dynamic models to make up for the deficiencies of past research. (2) Due to the differences in regions, local governments have different fiscal budgets. Therefore, this article uses the Wilcoxon Test to explore the efficiency differences of local governments in different regions. (3) This article analyzes the impact of central subsidies and government deficits (debts) of local governments on fiscal efficiency, and discusses the efficiency of government fiscal execution. The results are as follows. (1) Seven counties and cities with the best efficiency, and seven local governments with poor efficiency. (2) The fiscal performances of outlying islands and eastern local governments are better than those of western local governments. (3) Kaohsiung City has the highest accumulated debt and Tainan City exhibits poor financial performance.

The impact of fiscal decentralization on the efficiency in social housing provision: Evidence from China

“…The government is the core subject of social housing provision and plays a fundamental and leading role in improving people's basic livelihoods in China. Fiscal decentralization, a vital arrangement for the distribution of financial and routine power between central and local governments, determines the expenditure efficiency of fiscal resources and the preference and behaviors of the government to some extent (Chiu et al, 2021; Liu et al, 2016), thereby affecting the ESHP. Under the current Chinese fiscal decentralization system, a target‐oriented responsibility system is adopted in the social housing provision wherein the central government is the planner of the construction targets and local governments are the commanders‐in‐chief and subjects of liabilities for social housing construction and management (Dang et al, 2014).…”