The characteristics of local government debt governance: evidence from qualitative and social network analysis of Chinese policy texts

Abstract

This paper takes 66 local government debt governance policy texts from 2009 to 2019 as sample, and constructs an analysis framework of ‘target debt - management measures - mechanism guarantee’, derives up with identifying the characteristics of determining local government debt governance in China. The results show as follow: (i) It attaches more importance to the policy design of ‘borrowing’, ‘repayment’ and ‘management’ on local government debt instead of the ‘usage’ in China. (ii) The evidence supports the relatively average coding distribution of each policy, but the content is quite different. (iii) It manifests the new development value of ‘people-oriented’ and the concept of collaborative governance in the policy design. (iv) It has formed a ‘centre-edge’ model for the governance of the local government debt. This paper provides a new perspective for the study of the problems of local government debt governance, and puts forward policy recommendations for improving the governance of the local government debt.