Fiscal federalism and soft budget constraints: The case of China
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
China has been held up as a modern-day exemplar of ‘market-preserving federalism.’ This article challenges this popular belief by showing that its local governments face soft budget constraints. Fiscal indiscipline among subnational governments, which risks national indebtedness and macroeconomic instability, can pose serious dangers to federations. A large body of literature which proposes solutions to fiscal indiscipline through electoral incentives and political party structure cannot be applied to China. The Chinese Communist Party’s cadre-evaluation and dual accountability systems make it an imperative for local officials to augment fiscal revenue and allow them to tap resources at local credit institutions. This has resulted in mounting local government debt, the lion’s share of which is unrepaid loans owed to local credit institutions. To harden budget constraints, political institutions need to be reconfigured to allow the central government more effectively to hold local authorities accountable for resources deployed in achieving their job-performance targets.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it