Abstract: Food security and economic development are important foundations and guarantees for national security, but the spatial deviation of “economy-grain”, i.e., the uncoordinated relationship, will not only delay the strategic pace of building China into an agricultural power, but also hinder the high-quality development of China’s economy. Therefore, by making use of the panel data from 1864 county-level governments in China from 2000 to 2020, this paper studies the impact and the internal mechanism of the fiscal reform of “province-managing-county” (PMC) on the spatial deviation of “economy-grain” (SDEG). The findings show that the fiscal reform of “province-managing-county” will to a certain degree intensify the spatial deviation of “economy-grain”, i.e., it will result in the deepening of the discordant degree between grain production and economic development. The mechanism analysis indicates that the intensification of SDEG is caused by the increase in fiscal decentralization and the level of non agricultural economic development, as well as the decline in agricultural market vitality. The heterogeneity analysis reveals that compared to other regions, the fiscal PMC reform has the greatest impact on the SDEG in the central and western regions and the concentrated and contiguous poverty-stricken areas; when without being constrained by the responsibility for grain production, the policy effect of the fiscal reform of PMC should be mainly focused on economic growth. Therefore, it is necessary to optimize the implementation mode of the fiscal reform of PMC, and reverse the non-grain development tendency of the county-level governments; to establish a linkage mechanism between food security and promotion incentives, and revise the guidance of county-level officials towards “moving towards the economy and away from grain”; to improve the mechanism of interest compensation, and relieve the financial pressure in major grain producing counties; and to reform the financial supervision mechanism in the counties, and strictly control the financial resources towards the direction of expenditure.

Key words: fiscal decentralization, fiscal reform of "province directly governing county", "economic-grain" spatial deviation, food security