Research on the Impact of County-to-District Reorganization Policy on Local Government Debt——Based on the Dual Perspective of Hidden and Explicit Debt

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6463-835-6_109How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Local government debt; County-to-district reorganization; Administrative restructuring

Abstract

The county-to-district reorganization reform, as an important means of administrative division adjustment, has brought unpredictable local government debt risks while promoting urbanization. Based on the quasi-natural experiment of “county-to-district reorganization”, this paper empirically examines the impact of county-to-district reorganization on local government debt by using the data of 270 prefectural-level cities from 2007 to 2022. It is found that the county-to-district reorganization reform significantly increases the implicit debt of local governments, while it has no significant effect on the explicit debt of local governments. Mechanism analysis shows that county-to-district reorganization will promote the implicit debt growth through two channels, namely, land finance effect and economic growth target effect, and it is also found that the level of basic public services has a weakening moderating effect on the relationship between county-to-district reorganization and local implicit debt. Heterogeneity analysis shows that the expansion of hidden debt scale is more serious in the central and western regions, low administrative level cities and small cities. By studying the different impacts of county-to-district reorganization reform on local government implicit and explicit debt, this paper provides empirical evidence and policy references for increasing implicit debt replacement and preventing and resolving local debt risks.

Copyright

© 2025 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Shufang Deng
AU  - Shiwei Wu
PY  - 2025
DA  - 2025/09/17
TI  - Research on the Impact of County-to-District Reorganization Policy on Local Government Debt——Based on the Dual Perspective of Hidden and Explicit Debt
BT  - Proceedings of the 2025 3rd International Academic Conference on Management Innovation and Economic Development (MIED 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 1016
EP  - 1028
SN  - 2352-5428
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6463-835-6_109
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6463-835-6_109
ID  - Deng2025
ER  -