Research On Shandong Provincial Government Overall Co-ordinating Responsibility For Rural Compulsory Education Funding

With the implementation of the safeguard mechanism for rural compulsory education,referred to "new mechanism", the study concerning the implementation effect of theprovincial government overall co-ordinating responsibility has become a hotspot in recentresearches. RDD method is a quasi-experimental method, which can effectively solve theproblem of endogeneity, and has been widely used in the research of the policy evaluationin recent years. RDD method can be used to analyze the financial behavior of thecounty-level government in Shandong Province, and thus evaluate implementation effectof provincial government overall co-ordinating responsibility in "new mechanism". Thisresearch suggests that, from the view of quantity,"new mechanism" reform did not have asignificant impact on regional county-level government’s per capita education expenditurein2006. At the same time, transfer payment policy did not lean to underdeveloped regions,therefore regional disparities of compulsory education did not appear significantlynarrowed. However, the RDD analysis concerning per capita productive expenditure andadministrative expenditure per capita shows that the implementation of "new mechanism"did not produce significant "Crowding out Effect". This conclusion indicates that, becauseof the deficiency of the provincial government financial investment amount, the effect ofthe provincial government overall responsibility is not so significant, and it is also hard toeliminate the existing development gap between regions.The shortage of provincial government financial investment in compulsory educationlargely dues to the lack of accurate calculation of the total financial demands for ruralcompulsory education. By absolute index accounting based on educational standard settingand relative indicators index accounting based on the international comparison, we can getthe total financial demand of rural compulsory education and its project structure,hierarchy structure, as well as source structure. Based on this calculation result, a moreefficient project structure and source structure of compulsory education can be set, in orderto build an effective mechanism for Shandong provincial government overall co-ordinatingresponsibility.