实证论文 tax rights in transition economies a regedy of the commons.pdfVIP

Journal of Public Economics 76 (2000) 369–397 www.elsevier.nl/locate/econbase Tax rights in transition economies: a tragedy of the commons? a b , * Daniel Berkowitz , Wei Li a University of Pittsburgh, Department of Economics, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA bDuke University, Fuqua School of Business, Durham, NC 27708-0120, USA Abstract This paper develops the concept of tax rights to analyze the impact of fiscal institutions on economic development in transition economies. A government’s tax rights are poorly defined when it and other governments and agencies can unilaterally levy taxes on the same tax base. Existing evidence suggests that Chinese local governments have gained more clearly defined tax rights than their Russian counterparts. Using the ‘big push’ model of industrialization [Murphy, K., Shleifer, A., Vishny, R., 1989. Industrialization and the big push. Journal of Political Economy 95, 1003–1026] within a common-property resource framework, we show that this difference in tax rights helps explain why China has been significantly more successful than Russia.  2000 Elsevier Science S.A. All rights reserved. Keywords : Tax rights; Economic transition; Economic development; China; Russia JEL classification : H32; H77; O23; P52 1. Introduction China initiated its economic reform in the late 1970s; Russia began a more radical reform program in the early 1990s. The performance difference of these This paper was previously entitled ‘Decentralizatio