Individual Characteristics, Administration Preferences and Corruption: Evidence from Chinese Local Government Officials’ Work Experience

摘要

The Chinese corruption beyond the pressure-style fiscal decentralization system is largely dominated by the preferred duty performances decided by local political authorities. By designing a natural experiment about whether the officials leave their positions or not, the research combines the methods as difference-in-difference model and system generalized method of moments to explore the inter-correlation of the provincial party committee secretary’s individual character, administration preferences and local corruption level in 30 provinces from 2000-2013 in China. The results show us that the exchange in different places and cross appointment for provincial party committee secretaries will be able to strength the anti-corruption mechanism; meanwhile, the intellectual officers and young and middle-aged chief leaders are more likely to carry on the short- term encouraging policy. They are good at using their own employee experiences to encourage the officers from each level to form an “increasing-style promoting competition” order. The current Chinese anti-corruption strategy has obvious space-club effect and path dependence effect. In addition, the corruption attached to regional-scale can be gradually eliminated through the transfer of consumptive governmental expenses, fiscal decentralization reform, and continuous urbanization, enlarging the open areas. However, the lower corruption degree areas as west and middle areas may be trapped into another round of corruption as a result of the environment-sacrifice investment policies, which are caused by the employment expansion plan led by local leaders.