Empirical Study On The Efficiency Of China's Urban Public Expenditure

Because of urban disease brought about by the rapid development of urbanization, urban governments are assumed greater responsibility for the provisition of urban public goods.There are significant differences between urban and rural in the scope of public goods, supply capacity, demand for the quantity and quality of public goods, the residents'satisfaction with public goods, etc. Direct control of the county system provide an institutional guarantee for the urban governments to supply urban public goods concentratedly. Urban public goods supply system defects makes public expenditure inefficient.These make the study on the efficiency of urban public expenditure very significant.In this dissertation, closely around the theme of urban public expenditure efficiency,I point out that public expenditure efficiency is a comparison of public expenditure and earnings when urban government use budget funds to provide urban public goods and public service. The standard of public expenditure allocative efficiency is Pareto optimal, the standard of public expenditure technical efficiency is the standard production frontier. In this dissertation, I analyzes the conditions of urban pure public goods and mixed public goods efficiently provided and point out that cost-benefit analysis is a efficient measure to a specific urban public expenditure policy or project. Efficiency of urban public expenditure is related to urban public expenditures scale and structure. Population, the area, GDP, government departments' internal efficiency and fiscal decentralization has impacts on public expenditure efficiency. China's urban public expenditure system consists of decision-making mechanism, the use of mechanisms, funding mechanisms, monitoring mechanisms and other accessories.Data Envelope Analysis (DEA) is a method of accounting efficiency.By constructing a urban public expenditure composite output index, budget expenditure being the input variables, using two-stage DEA-Tobit method,in this dissertation,Ⅰempiricaliy analyzes the efficiency of the China's 273 prefectural level and above cities'public expenditure and come to the conclusions that the efficiency of the urban public expenditure is relatively low and decreasing returns to scale. At the same time, I analyzes the impact of environmental variables such as population, area size, GDP, internal efficiency of government departments, fiscal decentralization on the efficiency of public expenditure. In this dissertation, using eight prefecture-level cities in Jilin province as samples,based on customer satisfaction theory,through the questionnaire survey, I conducted a probit model regression on the efficiency of each city's public expenditure using residents'satisfaction with the supply of ten specific public goods,such as education,health,and personal variable characteristics,such as gender, age, etc from the perspective of urban residents.The results show that the level of residents'satisfaction with specific public goods and personal variable characteristics will affect the level of residents'satisfaction with the efficiency of each city public expenditure. Efficiency of each city public expenditure,which main is government and consumer's satisfaction with public goods,which main is residents together constitute the system of urban public expenditure efficiency. According to the matching degree of public expenditure efficiency and residents 'satisfaction, the system of urban public expenditure efficiency is divided into coordination and non-coordination type. the efficiency system of urban public expenditure in each city is similar,because of similar public goods supply system and similar political, social and cultural system. There existsδconvergence in efficiency of urban public expenditure. In this dissertation, using panel data analysis model and eight prefecture-level cities in Jilin province as samples,I study empirically the impact of higher levels of government's vertical transfer payments to the lower levels of government on the efficiency of recipient city's public expenditure.The results show that the impact of returned transfer payments on the efficiency is "U"-type features, financial transfer payments has a negative impact, special transfer payments is conducive to recipient city to improve the efficiency of public expenditure.Based on the above analysis, I proposed that we should transform government functions, enhance the participation of residents, perfect the system of special transfer payments, actively promote the implementation of city government performance budget, take into account the efficiency of urban public expenditure when setting and adjustment of administrative divisions.