The Contract Accountability Design For Chinese Government Purchases Of Public Services

Since the theory of public goods proposed, public goods and public services began to appear in people’s cognitive field of vision. In recent years, when the governments intend to provide a more diverse public service, no longer take the traditional way of establishing new institutions, or expanding the personnel of public officials. Instead, they began to purchase services and recruit contractor as their partner, and themselves just take the responsibility of funder and contract administrator. Today, most providers of public services are social organizations. And the market-oriented public service provision reflects that the cooperation between government and social organization is much closer than ever. Due to popularity of this political and social interaction, government purchase public services has become a major source of social organizations’ operating expenses. Accordingly, social organizations have become a major carrier to support the public managers in a number of areas to provide public services. The main objective of government purchase public services is transforming government functions and deepening the reform of institutions, optimizing public service management and improving the efficiency in the use of financial resources, and fostering social organizations. This will promote positive interaction between political and social organizations, optimizing the allocation of resources, and enhancing the ability of public services provision.The act framework based on contract accountability is the essence of government procurement. By contracting with social organizations, the governments provide funds for the purchase of public services. And their own functions have transformed into public service monitoring and evaluation. Accordingly, authorized by the government, social organizations to operate independently to provide public services. Contract accountabilitys is the cornerstone of our government procurement of public services, and it sketched out the framework and fulfillment methods based on both sides’ responsibilities. This means that the agreed contractual arrangements and commitments, shining the rule of law. Unlike traditional assumptions of Public Administration, in purchasing activities, the government and social organizations’ relationship should be partners. Therefore, the repositioning of social organization has become the new mission of public managers. Only the design of both contract accountabilitys to purchase and optimizing the contract management, the effective supply of public service resources could be ensured.This dissertation focuses on how to optimize the process of service contracting by the design of contract accountabilitys. The content structure of this dissertation is made as the following arrangement. Firstly, based on the fact that the government and the social organizations’ relationship has changed, also take the spirit of the contract as a start line, I discussed the background and significance of this issue, and reviewed the current research, elaborated the basic concepts and theories, and clarified the train of thoughts, methods and basic concepts of the design of contract accountabilitys. Secondly, with the assumptions of principal-agent theory, transaction cost theory, and incomplete contract theory, this dissertation puts forward the basic idea and elements of contract accountabilitys design. Thirdly, after the case study of Suining, Sichuan, and focused on the connotation of public service purchase contracts, I examined the previous summary about the design the contract accountabilitys, and worked on the study of institutionalization and standardization of purchase activities. At last, I made summary about the approaches of optimizing the design of contract accountabilitys in the view of combining theory and empirical research.