CHEN Xudong, SHEN Liyun
Journal of Central University of Finance & Economics.
2025, 0(2):
21-37.
The digital economy has an increasingly far-reaching impact on the inter-governmental financial relations, which provides a new opportunity to stimulate the initiative and creativity of local governments.Based on the research perspective of local government's“competitive advantage”development strategy, this paper constructs a quasi-natural experiment with the pilot policy of“Broadband China”, and uses a dual machine learning model to investigate the impact of digital economy on regional tax competitiveness and its internal mechanism.It is found that the digital economy can release the fiscal incentive effect by reducing the vertical fiscal imbalance and strengthening the horizontal tax competition, and effectively improve the level of local tax competitiveness, and this effect is more significant in the cities that pay more attention to new quality productivity, receive more transfer payments, and provide better basic public services.Furthermore, the development of digital economy can also promote the improvement of the tax competitiveness of surrounding cities through the spatial spillover effect, and the spillover effect is the best in 200~400km.In addition, despite the increasingly fierce tax competition among local governments in the digital economy environment, this competitive behavior is no longer the traditional“race to the bottom”, but has turned to the benign competition aimed at improving regional tax competitiveness.Therefore, we should actively promote the development of digital economy, further release the fiscal incentive effect under the decentralization system, enhance the economic enthusiasm and autonomous ability of local governments, and guide local governments to regulate competition through the construction of a scientific and reasonable tax competitiveness evaluation system, so as to spontaneously achieve inter-regional tax coordination.