Abstract: Under the new economic normality, to improve the quality and efficiency of economic growth is an important goal of the current economic and social development. This paper makes use of China’s provincial panel data during 2000-2014 to explore the effects of the provincial fiscal expenditure structure on the quality of economic growth. The results show that the effect of the general economic growth quality of both productive expenditure and service expenditure is significantly positive, while the non-productive expenditure is negative. From the perspective of the five developmental concepts, the productive expenditure, service expenditure and non-productive expenditure have significant differences on the marginal effects of innovation, coordination, greenness, opening up and sharing. The quality effects of economic growth of inter-regional fiscal expenditure structure are also different. Therefore, in order to improve the performance of fiscal expenditure and its quality effect of economic growth, the government should further optimize the fiscal expenditure structure under the guidance of “Five Development Concepts”, increase the fiscal support to the service sector, such as science, education, culture, health, social security and so on, while keeping the existing efforts in productive expenditure and compressing the scale of non-productive expenditures.

Key words: quality of economic growth; fiscal expenditure structure; Five Development Concepts; productive expenditure; non-productive expenditure