Understanding the falsification of village income statistics

China Quarterly

Volumn , Issue 196, 2008, Pages 805-826

  Tsai, Lily L ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ESTIMATION METHOD; INCOME; INFLATION; QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS; STATISTICAL ANALYSIS; TOWNSHIP AND VILLAGE ENTERPRISE; VILLAGE;

EID: 66149105893     PISSN: 03057410     EISSN: 14682648     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0305741008001136     Document Type: Article

References (27)

1. See Carsten A. Holz, "China governance project: The institutional arrangements for the production of statistics," OECD Statistics Working Paper, 19 January 2005;
2. Albert Park and Sangui Wang, "China's poverty statistics," China Economic Review, Vol. 12, No. 4 (2001), pp. 384-98
3. and Yongshun Cai, "Between state and peasant: Local cadres and statistical reporting in rural China," The China Quarterly, No. 163 (2000), pp. 783-805.
4. Yao Yilin, "Zai quanguo sheng, zizhiqu, zhixiashi danwei mishuzhang zuotanhuishang de jianghua" ("Speech at the National Conference of Secretary-Generals of the Provincial Party Committees"), in Ministry of Personnel (ed.), Renshi bumen bangongshi gongzuo shiyong shouce (Handbook on Office Affairs of Personnel Departments) (Beijing: Beijing gongye daxue chubanshe, 1991 [1990]), pp. 18-19,
5. as cited by Yasheng Huang, "Administrative monitoring in China," The China Quarterly, No. 143 (1995), p. 832.
6. See Maria Edin, "Remaking the communist party-state: The cadre responsibility system at the local level in China," China: An International Journal, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2003), pp. 1-15
7. and Maria Edin, "State capacity and local agent control in China: CCP cadre management from a township perspective," The China Quarterly No. 173 (2003), pp. 35-52.
8. See Thomas P. Bernstein and Xiaobo Lü, Taxation without Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
9. Holz, "China governance project," p. 7.
10. Note that income sources include individual wages, family business income, property income and transfer income but that the NBS concept of household net income does not include a major income component, the rental value of owner-occupied housing. See Park and Wang, "China's poverty," p. 390
11. and Shi Li and Chuliang Luo, "Re-estimating the income gap between urban and rural households in China," paper presented for the Conference on the Rural-Urban Gap in the PRC, Harvard University, 6-8 September 2006, p. 3.
12. See, for example, Chris Bramall, "The quality of China's household income surveys," The China Quarterly, No. 167 (2001), pp. 689-705
13. and John Gibson, Jikun Huang and Scott Rozelle, "Improving estimates of inequality and poverty from urban China's household income and expenditure survey,' Review of Income and Wealth, Vol. 49, No. 1 (2003), pp. 53-68.
14. See, for example, Cai, "Between state and peasant," pp. 788-89. The Ministry of Agriculture (MOA) outlines procedures for calculating village net income per capita by sampling households, calculating each sampled household's income according to an MOA form listing a household's possible income sources, and dividing the net income of sampled households by the population of these households.
15. Cai, "Between state and peasant."
16. Holz, "China governance project," p. 7.
17. Bernstein and Lü, Taxation without Representation.
18. According to the Law on Agriculture passed in 1993, the combined total of township tongchou and village tiliu was not allowed to exceed 5% of the average township net per capita income. Bernstein and Lü have pointed out that this cap is frequently misinterpreted to apply to the entire tax burden of farmers and to include the state agricultural tax. See Bernstein and Lü, Taxation without Representation.
19. Village officials were asked the following questions: (1) in 2000 how much total village levies (or township levies or state agricultural taxes) were you supposed to collect? (2) in 2000 how much did you collect? The answer to (2) was divided by the answer to (1) in order to obtain the percentage of taxes or levies that village officials were able to collect. The answer to (1) is a figure that is set from above by higher-level governments.
20. For reports of local officials inflating income to increase tax extraction, see Andrew Wedeman, "Stealing from China's farmers: institutional corruption and the 1992 IOU crisis," The China Quarterly, No. 152 (1997), pp. 805-931
21. and Thomas P. Bernstein and Xiaobo L_dus, "Taxation without representation: Peasants, the central and the local state in reform China," The China Quarterly, No. 163 (2000), pp. 742-63.
22. For a detailed discussion of the use of cadre responsibility contracts to enforce targets for economic development, see Edin, "State capacity and local agent control" and Edin, "Remaking the communist party-state."
23. As expected, non-agricultural employment had a consistently negative relationship with over-reporting. This effect held in a simple bivariate regression, when county dummies were added, and when other variables discussed in this section were also included in the model. The level of confidence we have in the relationship waxes and wanes with the inclusion and exclusion of different variables in the model.
24. Edin, "State capacity and local agent control," p. 39.
25. 17 Zhu Xinfeng, "Nongcun xujia tongji xianxiang ji duice" ("The phenomenon and counter-measures of rural statistical misreporting)," 22 November 2004, available online at http://www. chinaelections.org/xjzl/ readnews.asp?newsid5{50059C66-6540-4386-B159-C3868D550439}.
26. In a bivariate regression, for example, distance from the county seat is not statistically significant (p-value = 0. 60).
27. See Lily L. Tsai, Accountability without Democracy: Solidary Groups and Public Goods Provision in Rural China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).