The Fiscal Framework And Urban Infrastructure Finance In China

China has experienced more than 25 years of extraordinary economic growth. Underlying this growth has been a decentralized fiscal system, in which provinces and large cities are given the freedom to make infrastructure investments to stimulate local development, and are allowed to retain a large part of the fiscal revenues that are generated from economic activity. Although successful as a growth strategy, this policy created two problems for national fiscal management. First, it significantly reduced the central government's share of fiscal revenues, which fell from 34.8 percent in 1980 to 22 percent in 1992. Second, it widened economic and fiscal disparities between the rapidly growing urban coastal region and the rest of the country. Rapid growth in subnational debt (which rose 23-fold in a decade) and subnational nonperforming loans (estimated by the authors to range between US