Effect of Local Government Expenditure on the Ratio of Output to Capital: Evidence from Panel Data at China's Provincial Level

This paper divides the expenditure of local government into the productive and nonproductive expenditure for revealing the effect of local government's expenditure on output-capital efficiency through model and empirical analysis. In general, the elasticity of productive expenditure is more than that of nonproductive in a developing country. Therefore, the drawing effect of productive expenditure on economic growth is more than nonproductive one. However, the positive drawing effect of local government's expenditure on the ratio of output to capital can be displayed only if the expenditure is within a reasonable scale. When the public expenditure has surpassed the limit, there will be a negative influence. Through our empirical analysis on current Chinese economic data, it shows that the positive drawing effect of local government productive expenditure on the ratio of output to capital is remarkable; however, the positive effect of expenditure on economic construction is critically small. In some areas, the government expenditure behavior has indirectly become the economic intervention and it reveals the negative effect and low efficiency in high speed of economic growth. It is imperative for Chinese government to improve the efficiency of economic growth by adjusting the expenditure structure of local government.