(Correspondent: Feng Zhuoran) Recently, the paper "Urban Administrative Ranking, Bargaining Power and Export Tax Burden: A Perspective Based on the Spatial Distribution of Industry", co-authored by Professor Huang Jiuli and Hu Jing, was published in The Journal of World Economy, No.9, 2021.

Urban administrative ranking measures the administrative distance between local and central governments and determines the resource allocation capacity of each city and bargaining power of central and local governments when formulating industrial policies. Taking the non-neutral transformation of the 2004 export tax rebate policy in China as a quasi-natural experiment, this paper examines the influence of industry bargaining power based on the urban administrative level weighted by the employment spatial distribution on the export tax burden formed by incomplete tax rebate. The study finds that, since the adjustment of tax rebate policy, industries distributed more in cities with high administrative levels have grater bargaining power, so that export taxes to be born is correspondingly lower. This effect is heterogeneous at the production stage, for it is greater in upstream industries; the influence of industry bargaining power on export taxes is partly achieved through the provision of organizational resources between central and local government.