Local Government Behavior and Urban-Rural Income Gap

At present, China is gradually shifting to a modern governance system and governance capacity, which forces local government behavior to be more systematic, synergistic and modernized. Under this condition, the role of local government behavior in narrowing the urban-rural income gap is studied. To provide a solid foundation for the construction of China's modern governance system and comprehensive poverty alleviation, this paper, based on the panel data of 283 prefecture-level cities in China from 2004 to 2016, studies the relationship between local government behavior and urban-rural income gap. The results show that comprehensive local government behavior can significantly reduce the urban-rural income gap over other control variables. Even the conditions of urban fixed effect and time fixed effect under consideration, this result is still significant; the effect of local government behavior on narrowing the urban-rural income gap also has significant heterogeneity. Under the conditions of various robustness tests such as solving endogenous problems, when eliminating extreme values, replacing interpreted variables, and using time distance and geographic conditions, the local government behavior can still significantly reduce the urban-rural income gap.