China Program International Fellows, 2012–2013

The Lincoln Institute's Program on the People's Republic of China awards research fellowships to international faculty and researchers who are working on land and tax policy issues relevant in China. These fellows undertake research and participate in conferences and other Lincoln Institute activities. Priority topics include urban economics, land use and policy, urban and rural planning, local public finance, and property taxation.

  • Yilin Hou
  • Professor of Public Finance, Department of Public Administration and Policy, University of Georgia
  • Qiang Ren
  • Associate Professor, School of Public Finance, Central University of Finance and Economics
  • Institutionalizing Local Property Tax in China as Revenue-Service Link and Tool for Higher Efficiency via Public Choice
  • This study uses China's recent introduction of local property taxation as a natural experiment to examine how it affects local governmental financial capacity, reshapes intergovernmental relations by increasing local discretion, and raises efficiency in public service provision via more direct channels for public choice. This project is designed to investigate three aspects of introducing the local property tax(LPT): (1) creation of LPT as an institution; (2) LPT as own-source revenue for public services; and (3) LPT revenue as tool to raise efficiency via public choice. The project's objective is to examine the introduction of LPT in the political and state context of China in order to generalize from a country-specific experience and provide new insight into governance issues in local public finance.
  • Si-Ming Li
  • Chair Professor, Department of Geography and Centre for China Urban and Regional Studies, Hong Kong Baptist University
  • Yushu Zhu
  • Ph.D. Student, School of Architecture, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  • Sheltering the Floating Poor: Housing Access and Residential Mobility of Rural Migrants in Urban China
  • This study investigates two interrelated questions—how low-income households have been affected by the strengthening of market forces in urban land development, and how urban housing markets provide housing for the urban poor. By investigating the patterns of residential mobility of rural migrants through the 2005 national mini-census data, the authors examine the relationship between marketization and housing access/conditions for rural migrants as revealed by prefecture-level variations. The authors also employ the 2005 Guangzhou mini-census micro data and three waves of Guangzhou household survey conducted in 2000, 2005, and 2010 to reveal the trajectory of vertical (downward versus upward) and horizontal (spatial) patterns of residential mobility of rural migrants and identify institutional and individual-level factors that affect their residential moves.
  • Jorge Martinez-Vazquez
  • Regents Professor, Department of Economics, Georgia State University
  • Yongzheng Liu
  • Ph.D. Student, Department of Economics, Georgia State University
  • Interjurisdictional Tax Competition and the Loss of Farmland in China
  • This empirical analysis uses a panel of provincial-level data in China for 1984–2006 to contribute to the current literature on tax competition among provincial governments. The authors calculate for each province the average effective tax rates on foreign investments, which takes into account the tax incentives for which foreign investors are eligible and better reflects the overall effective tax burden born by foreign investments. They examine the impact of each province’s characteristics (including its size and level of industrialization) on the strategic interactions with its neighbors, and how the strategic interactions changed before and after the tax-sharing system reform in 1994. The authors also examine whether some provinces emerge as Stakelberg leaders in the tax competition game, and explore the establishment of development zones as an important conduit of provincial tax competition and possible cause of large-scale loss of farmland.