earticle

영어

Amid growing tensions surrounding disruptions to the existing order of global balance of power, countries around the world have long ramped up their science and technology investment in the hope of securing better economic as well as national security. Given the profound ramifications for the stability of the global community, the astounding speed and the breadth of China’s technological advancement in particular have been a topic that received substantial international attention. At the same time, the traditional burden-sharing structure between the central government and the local government went through a fundamental alternation under the Tax Sharing Reform such that the share of local government investments in science and technology now outshadows that of the central government. Hence, this paper aims to 1) analyze determinants of Chinese local governments’ science and technology expenditure and 2) identify patterns of regional disparities in investment practices between the country’s Eastern, Middle and the Western regions. Drawing on the theories of fiscal capacity and budgetary incrementalism, we conduct a fixed-effects model analysis of 2003-2016 budget expenditure data from 278 prefectures in China while controlling for a wide scope of social, economic and political factors. The findings of the analysis indicate that Chinese local governments’ science and technology expenditures have statistically significant correlation with socioeconomic factors (population, level of regional economic development, and the shares of the secondary and tertiary industries), characteristics of party committee secretaries (age at the time of appointment and the level of education), fiscal elements (level of fiscal independence) and the pull of budgetary incrementalism (past years’ science technology expenditure). Further, although the influence of budgetary incrementalism was present in all regions, its effect was most pronounced in the Western region followed by the Middle and the Eastern region.