Spatial Econometric Analysis On The Higher Education Resource Allocation Efficiency In China

As China’s higher education has rapidly developed in recent years, the contradiction between limited resources of higher education and its fast expansion has been increasingly prominent. It has become a big obstacle to the sustainable development of China’s higher education that the configuration of higher education resources is inadequate and inefficient. However, with the development of information technology, the GIS application is now extended to the humanities and social sciences, especially to the social change, economic development and public policy, etc. At the meantime, theories continue to get rich based on the application of spatial econometrics, which provides researchers with both convenience and new perspective of research. Therefore, based on a variety of quantitative methods and spatial analysis, the purpose of this study is to get the information of the spatial distribution of China’s configuration efficiency of higher education resources from multiple angles of country and regions, which helps us to grasp the higher education space efficiency of resource allocation more accurately and provide an important basis to ensure that the higher education resources can be carried out in an effective and balanced geographical space configuration.This thesis focuses on the efficiency and its influence factors of China’s configuration of higher education resources, among which efficiency is the main line throughout the research. First, in this thesis, the status quo of China’s configuration of higher education resources is analyzed, mainly from the principles of higher education resources connotation, characteristics, principle of higher resource allocation, subject of configuration, and object of configuration and spatial differences in the configuration of higher education resources, etc. Through the analysis, it can be found that the problems of optimizing the configuration of higher education resources and how to improve its efficiency are very necessary under the situation of current higher education resource being insufficient. Secondly, the efficiency of configuration of higher education resources is evaluated. Efficiency evaluation primarily includes designing efficiency evaluation index system of configuration of higher education resources, selecting evaluation methods and building models. It measured and analyzed the efficiency of the configuration of higher education resources in colleges and universities directly under the Ministry of Education as well as those in different regions with data envelopment analysis, Malmquist index method. Studies have shown that the resource allocation efficiency in most colleges and universities directly under the Ministry of Education is relatively high on the whole, but some colleges and universities’ efficiency is low, which explains that part of the resources invested may not have been fully utilized.Through measure of configuration efficiency of higher education resources in the various regions of China, it can be found that higher education resources from the eastern, central and western regions of China have experienced a decreasing trend, among which those in eastern and central regions are higher than the average level of each region, while that in western region is lower than the regional average levels. Since 1998, the configuration efficiency of higher education resources in all regions has been in a growth trend, while the development of technical efficiency is not obvious. This is probably because most technical progress index is more than one. By contrast, the increase of configuration efficiency of higher education resources becomes slowing down later, mainly due to the slow growth of technological progress.Also, this thesis carries on the empirical research on the influence factors of configuration efficiency of China’s higher education resources, analyzes spatial correlation of configuration of higher education resources by spatial econometric model and studies systematically the factors affecting the changes in resource allocation efficiency. It is found that configuration efficiency of China’s higher education resources has a significant spatial correlation. Therefore, when people analyze configuration efficiency, geospatial effects should not be ignored, which will provide theoretical and empirical basis for higher education reform.It can be shown that two factors---higher education reform and its scale have significant positive influence on the improvement of configuration efficiency of higher education resources. By contrast, both development level of regional economy and the marketization of configuration efficiency of higher education resources do not play the desired effect. Development of science and technology as well as scale of higher education has a significant effect on improving technical efficiency in higher education resources configuration, while the level of regional economic development has little effect as expect. Factors of higher education reform have a positive effect while levels of scientific and technological development and human capital do not reach the expected results.Finally, based on the previous research and practical experience, this thesis has proposed specific measures to improve the configuration efficiency of higher education resources in terms of subject of higher education resources configuration, object and configuration methods. More specifically, it requires us to deepen education reform, intensify reform of higher education, make a balance among government, market and scholarship, establish a sound mechanism of higher education resources configuration, increase investment efforts on education funding, optimize allocation of human resources of higher education, adjust the layout and structure of higher education, reduce disparities of space allocation of educational resources in different regions, promote inter-regional cooperation on higher education and support the development of higher education in central and western areas.