Abstract
As is well known, Chinese central government has full authority to determine the provincial and local officials’ turnover. However, China has not in detail interpreted the standards of officials’ promotions so far. In this paper, the latest database of city-level leaders for the period between 2002 and 2013 is utilized to investigate the influences of economic performance on party secretaries’ odds of being promoted. The estimation results by a panel multinomial logit method indicate that municipal annual GDP per capita is significantly positively associated with leaders’ chances of promotion. Specifically, the average GDP growth rates during leaders’ tenures have much higher effects. Moreover, some important factors of leaders’ personal characteristics also affect the political turnover. For instance, party secretaries’ connection with China’s Communist Youth League, political experience, educational level and professional expertise all have positive impacts on their chances of obtaining a promotion. In contrast, leaders’ ages and tenures are found to be negatively related to their promotion possibilities.
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Notes
The term “administration decentralization” here refers to the redistribution of decision making authority and financial and management responsibilities among different levels of sub-central government. During the reform era, China’s central government had gradually transferred some authority and political power to provinces and lower-level government, and allowed them to make some decisions or even launch new reforms that are important to local economic development. Some scholars argued that China’s administration decentralization, although not thoroughly, contributed significant to China’s phenomenal economic performance since the reform and opening-up started in 1970 s (e.g., Montinola et al. 1995; Jin et al. 2005; Cai and Treisman 2006).
The fixed-effects model calculates means for each variable and then subtracts the means; the constant and individual effects are also eliminated by this transformation eliminating unobserved heterogeneity by taking deviations from individual mean periods.
The variables that hardly vary over time should thus be excluded from the model (Mierau et al. 2007).
For more information on the database, please refer to http://www.hotelaah.com/liren/index.html.
For the logit model, if the coefficient of one explanatory variable is estimated to be β, the increase in the odds for the dependent variable to be 1 is exp (β) − 1 once there is a marginal increase in the value of the explanatory variable. For more details, refer to Wooldridge (2016).
In this paper, the classification of eastern, central and western regions is in accordance with the guidelines of the National Bureau of Statistics of China (NBS). Specifically, the eastern region includes Beijing, Tianjin, Hebei, Shanghai, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Fujian, Shandong, Liaoning, Guangdong, Guangxi and Hainan; the central region contains Shanxi, Inner Mongolia, Jilin, Heilongjiang, Anhui, Jiangxi, Henan, Hubei and Hunan; and the western region includes Sichuan, Guizhou, Yunnan, Shaanxi, Gansu, Ningxia, Qinghai and Xinjiang. The geological location of a city depends on the location of the province it is in.
For more information, please refer to http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-03-12/chinese-cadres-told-going-green-rivals-gdp-to-get-ahead-in-party.
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Acknowledgements
The authors acknowledge financial support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (71403015, 71521002), Beijing Municipal Natural Science Foundation (9162013), and the Joint Development Program of Beijing Municipal Commission of Education.
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Shi, Y., Chang, CP., Jang, CL. et al. Does economic performance affect officials’ turnover? Evidence from municipal government leaders in China. Qual Quant 52, 1873–1891 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11135-017-0573-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11135-017-0573-9
Keywords
- Economic performance
- Political turnover
- Municipal government leaders
- Panel multinomial logit model
- China