Fiscal Decentralization and Economic Growth in China: A Meta-Regression Analysis

In order to test whether the major empirical results on the "relationship between fiscal decentralization and economic growth in China" are affected by study characteristics, this paper conducts a meta-analysis of the major existing empirical literature. Our analysis indicates that some empirical results on how China’s fiscal decentralization affects economic growth are subject to different study characteristics. In particular, empirical results that fiscal decentralization has "significant positive effect" on economic growth are subject to such study characteristics as "region, labor and capital growth rate, other reforms and intra-budget capital." Through the funnel plot asymmetry test, the problem of publication bias is found to exist in the sampled literature and is concentrated in spending decentralization.