On The Equalization Of Infrastructure In Urban And Rural Areas

Infrastructure could not only improve the productivity of one country, but also improve the living standard of the local residents. So infrastructure is the symbol of the country's material civilization. After 30 years of reform and opening up, China's economy of the cities have grown quickly, the infrastructure nowadays in the cities could satisfy the need of the people in cities. But in the rural areas of China, rural infrastructure is still in deficiency. But we believe the people in the rural areas have the equal right to enjoy the achievement of the country's material civilization with the people in the cities. So it's very important to improve the rural infrastructure. So this paper gives the notion that we should develop the rural infrastructure as well as we could compare with the urban infrastructure. Namely we should realize some kind of equalization between the rural and urban infrastructure.The equalization of the urban-rural infrastructure is not this paper's original creation. China's central government has given the notion that the "equalization of public service in urban and rural areas" several times in many important documents. These years, the central government is trying to provide the equal public service between the rural and urban areas and public infrastructure is one kind of the most important public service. Because this notion embodied the government's will, so the academic world in China also gave out many researches after the notion of "equalization of rural-urban public services" was given by the central government. But in these researches, we can hardly find a paper which focused on the infrastructure. These researches are keen on the public sanitation, primary education and social security and some other kinds of public service just except infrastructure. The appearance of this situation is the result of three following reasons. The first, other kinds of public service are pure consumables but the provision of infrastructure is not only for consumption but also for production. The second, other kinds of public service are separable for every consumer, but infrastructure cannot be separated for everybody. The third, domestic researches are apt to deem the "equalization" as "equal quantity and equal quality", because of the different modes of production, rural infrastructure must be different to the urban infrastructure. Up to present there is still embarrassingly blank in the research of the equalization of infrastructure, though both the central government and the academic world of China have the same opinion that we should realize the equalization of public service and infrastructure is an important part of public service. Thus this paper believes we should give a more broad definition of the "equalization".After analyzing many different definitions of the social welfare function, this paper employed utilitarian social welfare function to explain the equalization provision of infrastructure between urban and rural areas. Because China is a developing country where more than half people are farmers, so utilitarian social welfare function could embody the farmer's good best than other kinds of social welfare functions. And because the specialities of infrastructure, such as infrastructure can not be divided and consumed equally by everybody, and utilitarian social welfare function also is built on the conception of colony, so utilitarianism theory is the most suitable for the research of infrastructure. Based on the utilitarianism theory, we believe "the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest number of people" is the most important social aim. Based on this conception, in the area of the infrastructural equalization research, we can get two basic demands. First, everyone's weightiness of the welfare in the social welfare function is the same. Second, rural infrastructure bring the same social marginal welfare of rural social welfare function (the sum of every farmer's welfare) with the marginal welfare of urban social welfare function which is brought by the urban infrastructure.But it's a pity that we cannot find a suitable index system to estimate the degree of this "equalization" or "inequality" based on the above two demands. So we need to analyze the two demands further. Because the infrastructure could affect the welfare of people by two ways, so there are two kinds of equalization we should realize. The first kind is indirect, infrastructure could affect the productivity of the factories (so the income will be higher) and expanding the space of the consumption, so infrastructure could improve the consumption and then improve the welfare. The second kind is direct, people consume the infrastructure and then get the utility. So the marginal welfare has two types naturally. Then this paper gives another two rules to estimate the equalization and inequality. First, the indirect marginal welfare should be same in the rural and urban areas. Because the farmers are poorer than the people in cities on the whole, so if the infrastructure could bring the same marginal consumption, we could deem this equalization coming into existence. Second, the direct marginal welfare should be same in the rural and urban areas. Because the degree of difficulty on consuming the infrastructure decided the size of the marginal welfare and the popularization rate or coverage rate could embody this degree of difficulty, so if the two kinds of "rate" are equal, we could deem this direct marginal welfare as the same. The third chapter of this paper gives an index system by the above thoughts. Then chapter 4, 5, 6 uses the data from China to analyze the degree of inequality of rural-urban infrastructure, the cause of formation of this inequality, the economic effects of this inequality. Chapter 7 analyzes the factors which affect the farmers' welfare coming from rural infrastructure. Chapter 8 gives the suggestions of how to realize the equalization of the infrastructure in rural and urban areas. The following text gives the details.This paper includes 8 chapters; the first chapter is the introduction of the whole paper. The second chapter is the literature reviews. From Chapter 3 to Chapter 8 is the main body of the whole paper.In the Chapter 3, the paper points out the aim of the "equalization of the infrastructure in rural and urban areas" is to realize the "the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest number of people" which is called utilitarianism opinion. Then this chapter gives the reasons of choosing this opinion. The second part of the chapter gives out the index system which could estimate the degree of the equalization or inequality of the infrastructure in rural and urban areas. The third part of the chapter talks about the preconditions of the equalization and the experiences of some developed countries. The last part establishes an endogenous growth model to talk about the related parameters' influences on the urban-rural infrastructure policy of the government.Chapter 4 analyzes the inequality of the infrastructure between china's rural and urban areas. The standard of the estimation here is coming from the index system in Chapter 3. At first, this chapter talks about the evolution of the gap (inequality) between rural and urban infrastructure in the history of China. Then this chapter analyzes the real gap between rural and urban infrastructure by employ the index system from the table 3.1. At last this chapter gets the result that rural infrastructure is far behind the urban infrastructure.After getting the conclusion in Chapter 4, Chapter 5 and Chapter 6 separately analyzes the reasons of the inequality of rural and urban infrastructure and the economic effects of this inequality. In Chapter 5, this paper gives the reasons form three aspects: in the processes of infrastructure investment, construction and maintenance. Chapter 6 analyzes the economic effects of the inequality by using the panel data of China. By using the way of factor analysis and the spatial linear panel model (with the software of Matlab6.5), this chapter analyzes the effects of the gap between rural and urban infrastructure which include enlarging the gap of living standard between rural and urban people, the gap of output per people between agriculture and industry, the gap of social infrastructure between rural and urban areas and decreasing the opportunity of the farmers getting wage income from non-agriculture.Chapter 7 analyzes the factors affecting the farmers' welfare coming from the rural infrastructure. Because the welfare is very difficult to estimate, so this paper uses the satisfactory degree of the rural infrastructure to substitute the welfare. Based on the investigation data of 670 families in 214 administrative villages in Shandong province and the Structural Equation Model (SEM), we find many useful results. Based on the analysis of the investigation, we find the farmers are dissatisfied with the irrigation and the environmental infrastructure. Based on the results of the estimation of SEM model, we find if the farmers had slower growth rate of the income, more superior style of the village, nearer to the center town, lower price of the infrastructures, smaller gaps between supply and requirement, better structure of the family, or more superiority complex coming from comparing with other villages, they would be more satisfactory with the rural infrastructure.After the analysis in Chapter 7, we have already had enough knowledge to think about the methods to realize the equalization defined by the paper. So Chapter 8 does this job. Based on the summing-up of the whole paper, this chapter first gives the principles which should be abided in the process of realizing the equalization we defined. Then, contra pose to the reasons of the gap between rural and urban infrastructure which is described in Chapter 5, this chapter gives the suggestions which help China realize the equalization of infrastructure in rural and urban areas in the processes of infrastructure investment, construction and maintenance. But the suggestions above focus on the commonness of all kinds of infrastructure, so the last part of the chapter, we gives some individual suggestions in allusion to the different kinds of infrastructure.The main innovative points are as follows. 1. In the researches of the equalization of public service in rural and urban areas in academic world of China, this paper first uses the utilitarian equalization theory as the base of the analysis. 2. This paper first uses the factor analysis and spatial econometrics to analyze the effects of the inequality of rural and urban infrastructure. 3.This paper also establish an endogenous growth model to talk about the related parameters' influences on the urban-rural infrastructure policy of the government.4.Based on the investigation data of 670 families in 214 administrative villages in Shandong province and the Structural Equation Model(SEM), the paper analyzes the factors affecting the farmers' welfare coming from the rural infrastructure.