地方政府创新与区域经济增长的关联性————基于中国区域间地方政府创新差异的跨案例分析

在不同区域的经济发展模式中，为什么中国地方政府在市场化进程中扮演的角色呈现出如此大的差异？以中国区域间地方政府创新的差异性为切入点，对五届(2001-2010年)中国地方政府创新奖的入围项目进行跨区域、跨类型、跨年度等维度的数据分析发现，行政改革与经济增长显著关联，同时，地方政府创新随着经济增长呈现出从政治改革向行政改革方向发展的趋势，但公共服务仍没有成为中国地方政府创新的焦点领域。这一发现的政策含义在于中央政府要自上而下地从制度和政策层面为地方政府创新提供公共服务和政治改革的激励机制和制度空间，自上而下地构建制度化分权机制，重视区域发展中地方政府创新的激励机制和制度空间的建构。

The Correlation between Regional Economic Growth and Local Government Innovations:An Inter-case Analysis of the Differences between Chinese Local Governments

In regional economic development, why are the Chinese local governments’ roles so different? Applying the quantitative method, we have compared the nominees of the five China Local Government Innovation Awards (2001-2010) and analyzed the inter-regional, inter-category and cross-year data of these nominees to probe into the correlation between the economic growth and the local government innovations in the eastern, central and western regions of China. The number of innovations of the local governments in the eastern region is far above that in the western and the central regions, and the number is greater in the urban area than in the rural area, both of which indicate the relationship between innovative ideas and economic growth. There is a significant inter-regional difference in the innovation types. The eastern region, with a higher level of economic development, centers around administrative innovations to meet the demand of market institutional development. One strong incentive to the political innovation in this region is economy. At the same time, its public service innovation is more effective than that in the western and the central regions. The central region has more political innovations; however, the governments in the western region show greater vitality in all kinds of innovations than the central region. Correlation Analysis has testified the significance of correlation between the administrative innovation and the economic growth. We also find that with economic development the local government innovations have gradually switched from political reform to administrative management, but attention has not sufficiently been paid to public service innovations. Therefore, the regional economic growth gives the local governments an endogenous incentive to innovate and there is more vitality in innovation in the developed areas than the undeveloped ones. On one hand, government innovations have greatly promoted the local economic development and regional marketization process and provided the necessary local experiences for the overall economic institutional reform. On the other hand the local government innovation becomes the crucial element for Chinese government innovation. The policy implication of this research for Chinese social transformation is that the state government should ensure greater policy incentive and leave institutional space for local government innovations in their regional development. China’s central government should set up an overall and top-down system of power decentralization and provide the institutional incentive for local governments to implement public service and political innovations. At the same time, the central government should put stress on local innovative autonomy which generates the ability to solve local problems. China cannot rely on the local economic development alone for its innovation incentive. Rather, it must push for the reform of political decentralization so as to guarantee the central authority and local autonomy.