Who Benefit from and Who Pay for the Local Public Services in Chinese Cities some Policy Implications
基于北京住宅和土地市场微观数据，用特征价格法估算地铁站、公交站和大型公园的经济价值，发现居民愿意为这些公共服务多付房价的17.1%、12.4%和6.4%，但土地价格中未体现，表明收益被开发商截留，建议开征房产税解决这一错配。
Quality of life determines the value of a city. Public services provided by local governments have great impacts on the quality of residents' daily life, and those public services are also long-term driving forces of urban growth. This paper discusses three related issues. First, how to estimate the economic value of local public goods; Second, whether or not the current cost-benefit structure of the construction and maintenance of those public goods is a balanced one; Third, is there a better way to finance those public services. Based on revealed preference method and hedonic technique, using two micro data sets of Beijing's residential market and land market, this paper builds a hedonic price equation to estimate the values of several public goods. The results show that households' willingness-to-pay for living in the vicinity of subway stops, bus stops and large parks are 17.1%, 12.4% and 6.4% of their corresponding housing values, respectively. However, such effects are not significant in the land price hedonic equation, which may indicate that the benefits from residents' wiliness-to-pay for local public goods are captured by developers, without being further transferred to the local governments who are responsible for building and maintaining those public goods. The proposed property tax can solve this mismatch problem to a great extent.