The Study On Mechanism And Role Of The Government In The Public Goods Provision Problem

The development of foreign public good theory has profoundly influenced the development of domestic public good theory. With the development of the study, the issue of public good provision receives more and more attention in the economics literature. The issue also includes the positioning of the government in the field of public good. In the age of planned economy, Chinese government plays the only role of the public good supplier. Since the economic reform, the provision of public good depends more on market than on government. In recent years, however, the increasingly serious problem of the under-provision of public good makes the positioning issue back in the spotlight.In the field of public good provision, traditional economic theory always makes negative conclusions on the basis of the hypothesis that all behaviors are completely selfish. However, the experience and facts are not always the same as these theoretic conclusions. Meanwhile, traditional empirical analysis always depends on the statistical data which can not support the study properly due to its scarcity and noises. These facts show that traditional economic theory and its method are not fully capable of explaining the public good provision problem. However, the experimental economics could solve these problems.Through the interdisciplinary research perspective and the research method of experimental economics, this paper designs a set of public good provision mechanisms, including voluntary contribution (control experiment), the leader mechanism, strong leadership mechanism and a new type of hybrid mechanism-incentive regulatory mechanism. In the environment of China, this paper explores the different impacts of the mechanisms to the contribution level to the public goods and the payoff level from the public goods projects. Furthermore, this paper studies the improvement level of different mechanisms compared with the control experiment and the hybrid mechanism. Last but not least, this paper tries to find out the relatively effective mechanism for the public good provision problem and makes an effort to locate the position of the leader (government) in the same situation.Based on the analysis of the experimental data, this paper tests the effects of a variety of public goods provision mechanisms in the environment in China, explores the behavioral characteristics of the participants of the experiment, and then analyzes by experimental results which public goods provision mechanism may be more helpful to improve the efficiency of public goods provision, enhance the overall welfare level, and find out what role the government should play in the public goods provision problem. The results of this study will be useful for the regulation and perfection of China's public goods provision mechanism and of practical significance in the innovation of the related theoretic field.