in practice, Chinese central government is stretched thinly across the giant bulk and complexity of the world’s most populous nation. Though responsibility for revenue collection falls heavily on central government, government expenditure directly controlled from Beijing has amounted to no more than 4 to 5 percent of GDP since the 1990s, a very small figure by comparison with its American or European counterparts. In China, 80 percent of government spending is done at the regional and local levels, where expenditure has surged between 1994 and 2008 from 8 to 18 percent of GDP, even as China’s
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