| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立中興大學 === 國家政策與公共事務研究所 === 106 === “The policy of the public finance is the mother of the various policies.” Solid finance is the expression of a government to show the responsibility and to provide the superior quality of public services for the people. In recent years, our Government expanded the scales of budgets and the burdens of debts became increasingly heavy. It has showed unbalanced development and the deterioration of local finance of the counties and cities gradually. In addition, there were many cases revealing that improper government financial management caused financial crisis in foreign countries. In consideration of these problems, how to arrange financial management and to solve huge public debts becomes an important issue.
The Government currently based on the principles of ”keeping the revenues within the limits of expenditure” and maintaining “budget balance” in preparing general budget. The Governments at all levels are trapped in the battle of financial allocation because of the insufficient annual revenue that cannot support annual expenditure for many years. The growth of expenditures have made the budget deficit the normal status for preparing budget. In the tide of promoting local self-government, local governments have asked the central governments to grant more responsibility for expenditures and revenues in various countries. Though by promoting local self-government system, local officials have more authorities in realizing the ideals of caring the public, the huge local debts also limit the processing in the meantime. It is inevitable to expand the debts if they cannot develop new financial sources and the municipal administration must be sustained.
The article, according to the huge debts and growth trends of local government, and with relevant research and empirical study, indicated that the relationship between local government revenue and expenditure were closely related and the local governments should bear the greatest responsibility for their financial status. Therefore, this study firstly performed current situation analysis with the “Local Finance Revenue and Expenditure of Taichung City” in post-merger stage as the main theme. Then, we conducted in-depth study for the changes of revenues and expenditures before and after the merger. The secondary data were utilized for the trend analysis of the finance revenue and expenditure (10 years before and 7 years after the merger). We tried to identified the problems and proposed the improvement strategies by using quality research and literature reviews.
It was found that both of the annual revenues and expenditures of Taichung City have shown the increasing trend since 2002. Though the two major sources of annual revenues which are income from aid and assistance and tax income have shown the steady growth, the five major annual expenditures of main political affairs, including expenditures in education and culture, economic development, social welfare, general government routine matters and police work, have increased even more. The expenditures listed above were the major expenditures and the expenditure proportion of legal obligation was over 80%. These situations indicated the rigidity of the expenditure structure. In the case of increasing shortage differences between expenditures and revenues, it must rely on the subsidies and the debt raising to meet the demands in various expenditures and constructions. The reasons for the deterioration of financial situations include the “Draft of Amendment in Act Governing the Allocation of Government Revenues and Expenditures” has not been passed and the financial resources cannot be delegated by the central government that caused insufficient self-financing. It is necessary to focus on finding new revenue sources and reducing expenditures, and to improve by changing systems such as tax system, budget preparing, specification reviewing, enforcement of public expenditure inspections and supervision. As concerning about the structure rigidity of the annual expenditures, the comprehensive considerations in various revenues and expenditures are also necessary. To set the priorities in budget expenditures and to spend in the reasonable range will be helpful in avoiding the great debt situations. There are several recommendations proposed by the study:
1.To comprehensively consider the adjustment of the
future local tax system of Taichung City with local
financial “benefit principle” by proper allocating the
three major property taxes of the local government,
including land value tax, house tax and deed tax.
2.To increase financial resources by ways of land
activation and civil participation.
3.To implement the spirit of Zero Basis Budgeting
System.
4.To increase tax by increasing expenditures of economic
development and capital construction.
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