Wang jianjun, joe yan
Despite its long history and its considerable build-up in recent disciplines, human financial knowledge remains largely fragmented and lacking in integration, and urgently needs to be linked together with a coherent main line to form a unified, scientific, rich and extensive knowledge system. Through this system, we will be able to gain insight into public finance in an ambitious economic and social context, thus providing a blueprint and details for ideal and viable financial arrangements。
The importance and complexity of collective goods and their institutional arrangements, which have long been widely recognized as the opposite of personal goods (privategoods), and have left its own footprint in the multidisciplinary fields of political science, management, economics, ethics, law and history, will no doubt continue. With the backbone of collective goods as a unique and independent research subject, fiscal science is well positioned to form its own independent and complete basic theoretical system。
The system could be structured around three core concepts of close association with collective goods: the financial community, the common pool resources and the field of commissioning agency relations, which point to the public supply of collective goods, from where (community), what resources (shared) are used, and what means (commissioned agents) are the three general public finance issues。
The term public domain (field), originally political and sociological terms, refers to relatively independent social spaces for political or social life, whether physical or non-physical, constructed jointly by members of society in accordance with specific logical requirements。
Public finance activities are typical of public life and are inevitably based on three basic contexts: first, a self-sustaining community with financial capacity, including grass-roots jurisdictions from the top to the bottom of the country. Secondly, the community must convert private property into shared pool resources as an indispensable resource for the public supply of collective goods. Third, since it is neither feasible nor necessary to raise and use pool resources in a person-at-person manner, agency arrangements are essential in a larger community, where public space for fiscal activity is built together。
The fact that these basic areas have been dismantled and that they have been studied independently in the relevant academic circles and have not been drawn by collective goods is the primary reason for the lack of foundation and fragmentation of financial support, and other reasons include the fact that research on collective object objects by relevant disciplines (especially economics) has not been carried out in three interrelated basic fields. The resulting new fiscal science can be expressed as four levels of a clearly identifiable “fiscal tree” of causality: fiscal phenomena (canoples), fiscal systems, policies and arrangements (tree branches), collective goods (trees) and three fiscal domains (roots). The latter covers the fiscal community, the pool of shared resources and the trust agency relationship. The term “shared resources” here refers specifically to financial resources as common property of the community, i. E., public resources in a broad sense, including flows and stocks。
Fiscal community
The history of the community is at least as old as that of human civilization. These communities have evolved in history either from natural evolution or from artificial construction. Human beings act collectively and in public life, more or less within a community of “yours”, reflecting human nature as a social animal. These are large, networked and pyramid-like, border-specific and diverse communities linked by fiscal (taxes and expenditures) ties. Human beings living in a financial community are simply pursuing “additional” benefits that cannot be achieved under individual assumptions of isolation (atomic societies). Distinguished from the forms of dissimilar and exclusive interests usually expressed by private goods (privategoods), these can be defined as benefiting from the general interests of all members of the community, typically expressed and communicated by collective goods for sharing among the members of the community, thus burdening the community and its members with each other's financial responsibilities towards the other, that is, sharing the costs of collective goods and the responsibility for the public delivery of collective goods。
For the members of the community, the pre-eminence of responsibility is reflected in the “pre-eminence” of individual choice. Whether or not an individual is given the purpose and value that are consistent with the choice of his preference and with respect for the rights of others, the fact that an individual is born with a particular community member and shares in it the general interest is not selective, as we cannot choose our parents and blood groups. In other words, membership in the community itself provides for the pre-eminence of responsibility, whether the role attached to it is subordinate, taxpayer or consumer, or citizen. First, responsibility requires members to hand over part of their property as common property of the community, thereby sharing the cost of public supply of collective goods, a large part of which is fixed. Economies of scale mean that all sharing is essential for the promotion of the general interest。
Few other ties are more basic, formal and frequent than financial ones. To that end, the community theory, which had already evaporated from modern fiscal science, should be re-engineered into a new integrated knowledge system. The system should and should be capable of taking on the heavy responsibilities. But the focus should shift from intergovernmental relations and local finance to more substantive topics: constructing the path of consumers, taxpayers, insiders or citizens is the most promising and promising path. How can the development of civic virtues be combined with efforts to build common financial ties, from the bottom up or from the top down
In the community language, the modern financial system should be seen not only as a means of meeting the collective needs of the people, but also as a function of educating citizens to shape a good community, which is no less vital and urgent than the previous task. Not only is the community capable of properly managing and making effective use of scarce resources, but it also has the capacity to enable it to organize itself with fewer conflicts of interest, which are even more important for achieving the ideals and objectives of a harmonious society。
Shared pool
In addition to the fiscal community space, the public supply of collective goods clearly requires the pool of shared resources, where community members hand over a portion of their property to the community in order to share the cost of collective goods as a way of reconciling the first responsibility of the community. The pre-eminence of financial responsibility (with moral responsibility) stems not only from the fact that the community exists before individual choice, but also from the fact that individual members benefit from the community in which they find themselves。
These financial resources (including funds and assets) derived from members form the common pool of resources (the commonresourcepool) collectively owned and used by the community. The pool of shared resources has its limits, and the danger is hidden in four inherent characteristics: limited volume, open use, privateization of benefits and socialization of costs。
The total amount of financial resources at the disposal of any government in a given fiscal year is limited, but the demand for resources (budget requests) is open, and there is always a motivation and opportunity for those seeking or benefiting from resources to pursue narrow interests, as well as a sufficient incentive and opportunity to pass on fiscal costs to taxpayers. The primary value of public expenditure management includes concerns about fiscal sustainability and intergenerational equity, which are higher than subsequent prioritization and operational performance。
The shared pool risks arise from common property rights per se, reflecting the plight of public property rights in human societies; no society can be deprived of public property rights, but lack of moderation inevitably poses risks. These risks come from four levels, one of which is the issue of free lunch: good things in the world, provided they are free or near free, are usually the most easily wasted. The second is that various forms of financial earmarking — including public funds — also reflect to some extent the impact of privileges and monopolies on the allocation of pool resources. Third, income earmarked as a general rule is appropriate only where there is a direct link between cost and benefit (e. G. By financing roads through road taxes). Fourthly, risks also stem from the hierarchy itself. Even where appropriate, the allocation of resources on the hierarchical basis is often costly to maintain the hierarchy. Because the benefits of hierarchies themselves induce more people to compete for hierarchies, such maintenance and cost competition constitute an important part of the social transaction costs described by cos。
Intergovernmental financial arrangements would lead to the issue of pooling local financial levels. In the view of local governments, if there is an opportunity to benefit by digging “the foot of the central treasury”, such as discretion or negotiation to determine transfers, the central treasury is expected to pay for the consequences of its own ethical risk behaviour, such as excessive borrowing of debts that cannot be paid for themselves. The best strategy, then, is to transfer fiscal costs to the centre or ultimately to taxpayers while privateizing financial returns. Such financial arrangements can easily create a high risk because each local jurisdiction has the motivation to do so。
Agency relations
The financial community answered “who”, and the pool answered “what” for the supply of collective goods, for which the trust agency relationship was tailored. Without care and language in this field, new financial science will not be able to develop a complete and rational knowledge system。
The field envisages the relationship between community members and the community as a commissioning agency: all members collectively entrust responsibility for managing pool resources and the delivery of collective goods to the community-government as agent. This includes, inter alia, the relationship between the representative body (the people's congress in the chinese context) and the executive branch, as well as between the central and local branches of the unitary state。
The anti-corruption campaign launched by china at a time of great intensity calls for, to a large extent, the institutionalization of trust agency relationships. The same is true of performance evaluations, both of which point to two paradigms that are highly relied upon to limit the issue of commissioning and its negative consequences: the paradigm of fiduciary responsibility and the paradigm of fiscal competition. The former focuses on fiduciary mechanisms, as well as a range of supportive mechanisms, including budgetary mandates, transparency, predictability and citizen participation, to strengthen and improve the government's financial fiduciary responsibilities to the people. The latter is concerned with limiting the opportunities and willingness of agents to extract fiscal rents by strengthening the virtuous competition for pool resources, where most earmarking arrangements tend to discourage competition. Identifying the rich and tangible implications of the two paradigms for the financial system is the central task of the new integrated financial theory system in the third domain。
The new fiscal system can be structured as a vertical chain of causality expressed as a “fiscal tree”: from top to bottom – from canopy to branch, to trunk, to root, and from bottom to bottom. The “new synthesis” begins with finding the fundamental part of the fiscal field of the “fiscal tree,” which has long been a clear missing link in fiscal science. The solution to financial problems — the community, the pool and the commissioning of collective goods and their linkages — must ultimately be “performance resolution” and “relationship resolution”; in other words, only when scarce resources are fully utilized can societies organize and operate in a way that is relatively free of obvious conflicts of interest and that is seen as resolving financial problems. (by central university of finance and economics)
