Bureaucrat Incentives, Governance And Power Regulation

The government management system of China is characterized by political centralization and economic decentralization and the supervision and assessment of local officials are mainly carried out by the superior government. The indicators for performance appraisal for local officials set by the central government are restrained to the economic performances in their prefecture to a great extent. According to the existing research, this evaluation mode applied to local officials contributes to the rapid economic growth of China, meanwhile causing a lot of negative problems in our country. Given the fact that there is no better method that can solve these problems in the existing literature, this paper will provide a research on bureaucrat incentives, government management and supervision of governmental powers from the perspective of public satisfaction appraisal.First of all, this paper makes a distinction between the central government’s interests, people’s interests and officials’interests from the perspective of the methodology of individualism before pointing out that there are differences in nature and even conflicts of interests among them. The analyses above lay a micro-foundation for this research. By way of setting up utility function fit for different subjects of interests, this paper argues that their variables of utility function are different. So the best way to prevent conflicts of interests between agents and principals is to establish the correct incentive system, which can enter the variables of utility that the clients care about into the agents’ utility function, so that their interests rise greatly in consistency.Secondly, this paper carries out a systematic research on the incentive mechanism for public satisfaction appraisal, implementation method, feasibility, practice on the part of local governments, the existing problems as well as the significance and so on, providing a research perspective for the upcoming study, most of which is conducted from the perspective of public satisfaction appraisal.Thirdly, this paper makes an investigation on the evolution of official examination system in our country and points out that the shortcomings existing in the current appraisal system are shown in the conflicts of interests between officials and people. The power structure of our country is marked by the fact that local officials are responsible for their superior government, not for the people in their prefecture, so that local officials can’t be restrained in a better way to protect the interests of the people. Public satisfaction appraisal is a system that can make local officials responsible for the people, coordinate the conflicts of interests between them and make local officials do efforts to safeguard the interests of the people. By setting up a promotion tournament model on the basis of public satisfaction, this paper provides an analysis of the mechanism of public satisfaction evaluation in coordinating conflicts of interests.Fourthly, this paper makes a research on the measures aimed at protecting the rights of people popular in the western country, such as voting by hands, voting with feet, protecting private property from being injured, etc., which are not mature in our country. Local officials hold enormous discretion which is not supervised in an effective way, resulting in their abusing powers. This paper offers an analysis of the supervising effects on officials’powers of the public satisfaction assessment, which can solve the problem of information asymmetry existing in the system of superior governments supervising the inferior governments, sets up a power supervision model based on public satisfaction appraisal and analyzes the supervision mechanism of this assessment method.Fifthly, this paper carries out a study of the efficiency of government in providing public service from the perspective of official incentive. In the first, this paper carries out a study of the efficiency of government in providing public service in a general way and points out that there is an effective boundary in government functions and that some services should be market-oriented. Then this paper also does a research on the efficiency of government in providing public service in a specific way, taking price controlling system as example, and points out that price controlling causes the rights of producers, consumers and officials to be altered, brings about the negative incentives, gives rise to great social welfare losses and misses the desired effect. Official economic performance evaluation leads to serious incentive distortions and inequality in public service supplying. Public satisfaction appraisal establishes the contestable market provides the right incentives for officials, and makes them do more efforts to provide high quality public services. Given that, public satisfaction appraisal of government officials should be vigorously promoted in our country.