Rural Public Goods Research

Since the reform and opening up, China's rural areas have undergone tremendous changes. However, behind the tremendous changes, the low-level supply of rural public goods has seriously hampered the development of China's agriculture, the peasants' income, the building of a new socialist village and the realization of agricultural modernization. Therefore, how to change the situation is one of the important problems the Chinese government and the theory fields should solve.The views of scholars at home and abroad are not uniform on the supply of rural public goods. They discussed respectively from the aspects of government supply, market supply, community supply, voluntary supply and multi-supply. After study these opinions and the relative theories of the public goods, this article holds that we should learn from the models of the government supply, market supply, community supply and voluntary supply.At present, there are serious government failures in the supply of public goods in China's rural area, which mainly express as the total supply shortage and the imbalance between the supply structures. The reasons are the weak supply will, the mistakes in decision-making mechanism and the non-uniform of government financial authority and power, and so on. To solve such problems, it is necessary to enhance the supply will of the nation, make clear the range of the public goods and perfect the government decision-making mechanism.The market supply of public goods in rural areas becomes an important supply mode because of the government failures, the shortage of funds of the public goods projects, the technical progress and the development of market economy. However, due to such reasons as the inadequate development of the market, the market failure in the supply of rural public goods is quite serious. The volume and the scope of market supply are also far from enough. Therefore, the market mechanism must be introduced to determine what kinds of rural public goods are suitable to be supplied by the market. Also the government should play an important role and we should improve the relevant countermeasures and the institution securities.The power of the state and the market should not be ignored in the supply of rural public goods, but the rural community also plays a big role. However, at present, the public goods supplied by the rural communities remain low in China. On one hand, the communities run short of sources of financing, on the other hand, the system of "yishiyiyi"has some defects. Therefore, in the present, we should create reasonable revenue sources for the village communities. In addition, the unreasonable rules in the system of "one case one meeting" should be improved in order to promote the community supply of public goods.At present, the voluntary supply of rural public goods also has a certain necessity and possibility. However, China's voluntary supply of rural public goods is far less than enough because of the residents' low income, the poor public awareness, the weak development of non-profit organizations (NPOs) and the the low confidence of the public owe to the non-standard development of the charitable causes. In order to promote the voluntary supply, we should effectively increase the residents' and the peasants' income, cultivate and enhance people's public awareness, take measures to vigorously develop the NPOs and standardize the local public organizations and charitable acts of public welfare undertakings.Since there are both advantages and disadvantages in government supply, market supply, community supply and voluntary supply, taking the characteristics of the supply models and the reality of our country into account, we should establish a multi-layered rural public goods supply mechanism in which the government supply is the main part, the market supply and the community supply are the assistant parts and the voluntary supply is supplementary in the reform of our rural public goods supply.