Research Of The Equalization Of Basic Public Services And Regional Urban-rural Gaps

After the Reform and Opening-up for more than 30 years,the economy achievements we got would be a proud to every Chinese.But just as building a house and the higher the building is the larger the shadow will be.Compared with the rapid economic growth,China's social development is lagging behind,and social gaps has become the focus.Unreasonable gap between the rich and the poor,reflected in the regional level reflects the difference in the living standards of residents,reflected in urban and rural areas is a serious income levels imbalance between the urban and rural.When the quality of life of different groups of people in the same society is still different after excluding the different of ability and diligence,it often means that there is inequality.In addition,the differences in social governance,education and cultural values and other aspects between the city and countryside also made the rural residents can't obtain the same level of opportunities to achieve self-development if compare with city residents,which means there are unfair opportunity.'Fairness is the foundation of a nation'.Social justice is of great significance to the stable and development of a country and the acquisition of personal utility.How to narrow social gaps is the key issue in the development of China in the new period.Narrowing social gaps depends on the progress of social development,and social development is based on public services.So whether the equalization of public services can narrow social gaps?And how to narrow social gaps?It becomes a question worthy of reflection,and answering these two questions is the meaning and purpose of this paper.When we talk about the previous literature on the equalization of public services and social gaps,there are a lot of relevant achievements,after reading them I found that it help a lot,but I also find the relevant research have some shortcomings.First of all,the research on the equalization of public services tend to use a single public services project as the research object or submit the public services projects as one index,the former research is too narrow to make recommendations for the equalization of public services from the macro level,while the latter way may failed to take the attribute diversity of public services projects into account,which may conceal the nature of the problems.Secondly,research on the social justice effect of equalization of public services is not enough and especially in empirical research,and I can't find papers which divided social gaps into two parts:regional gaps and urban-rural gaps,and empirical analysis them from the perspective of both fair result and fair opportunity.Then,the mechanism analysis of the impact of the equalization of public services on social gaps and how to realize social equity is relatively insufficient.Finally,taking both the spatial effect and the inertia of time effect of public services and social justice into account,then use of dynamic spatial econometric model to do empirical study with urban panel data is also less.Based on the purpose of the study and the shortcomings of the past literature,this paper attempts to study the social fairness effect of the equalization of public services from the following aspects.First of all,in the foundation of constructing index system to measure and the equalization of public services level of the urban and rural areas with Chinese provincial and municipal panel data,we divided the public services items into "operating" services and "non-operating" public services according to whether the public services projects can produce direct economic benefits or no,and also divided the public services items into "hard" public services and "soft" public services according to whether the public services level is the same to the registered permanent residences and unregistered permanent residences.Then we can analysis the equalization level of different kinds of public services.At the same time,the social gaps are divided into 3 categories,they are the gap of regional outcomes,the gap of urban and rural outcomes and the opportunity gap of urban and rural areas.And using the same dimensions of data to analyze the current situation of regional and urban-rural socialgaps in China.The above definitions and results also provide the theoretical basis and data base for the game model and empirical research.Then,by defining the central and local government utility function,public service-production function,floating population migration decision function to construct a game model to analyze the impact of the equalization of public services on social gap.After confirming that the equalization of public services has a certain social equity effect,the paper further analyzes the realization mechanism of this effect.Finally,this paper constructs an econometric model to test the 11 theoretical propositions from the game analysis,and based on the results of the study,we puts forward some policy recommendations to narrow social gaps by realizing the equalization of public services.The empirical research is the main part of the paper and the source of the conclusions,the relevant sections are empirical tests about the impact of equalization of public services on the regional social gap,the impact of the equalization of public services on the social gap in urban and rural areas,and the realization of social fairness effect of the equalization of public services.(1)In the area of regional social gap,this paper uses the panel data of China's 30 provinces of 2001-2014 to construct the dynamic spatial autoregressive model,and the results show that,the equalization of public services is a feasible way to narrow the gap of income and consumption among different provinces,namely,proved the existence of regional economic fairness effect;about the different kinds of public services,there is an economic fairness effect in both the regional equalization of "operating" public services and"non-operating" public services,and the fair effect of "operating”public services is better than that of "non-operating" public services;and there is also an economic fairness effect in the regional equalization of "hard" public services,while the equalization of "soft" public services will lead to regional disparities.(2)In the area of urban-rural social gap,this paper uses the panel data of China's 286 cities of 2001-2014 to construct the dynamic spatial autoregressive model and panel threshold model,and the results show that,from the perspective of economic fairness,the equalization of urban and rural public services and the equalization of urban and rural"operating" public services can help to reduce the income gap between urban and rural areas,that is,there exists urban and rural economic fairness;from the perspective of opportunity fairness,the equalization of urban-rural public services can promote the fairness of the opportunity between urban and rural areas,the impact of the equalization of regional public services has a threshold effect on the urban-rural opportunity equity and the threshold variable is rural economic level,from the perspective of classified public services,the equalization of both "operating" and"non-operating" public services between urban and rural areas plays an important role in promoting urban-rural opportunity equality;while,the equalization of both”operating" and "non-operating" public services among areas have threshold effect on the urban-rural opportunity equality.(3)In the area of the realization of social gap effect,this paper uses the panel data of China's 30 provinces of 2001-2014 and 286 cities of 2001-2014 to construct the dynamic spatial autoregressive model,and the results show that,fiscal decentralization is not conducive to the realization of social equity effect of regional public services equalization,and this effect is mainly reflected in the "operating" public services,household registration regulation will promote the realization of social equity effect of "hard" public services equalization,household registration regulation is not conducive to the "soft" equalization of public services,but it will promote the realization of social equity effect,because the "soft"equalization of public services is not conducive to regional economic fairness;fiscal decentralization is not conducive to the realization the urban-rural fair effect of equalization of public services,and this effect is mainly manifested in the "operating"public services,the impact of non-operating public services equalization is not significant.The impact of fiscal decentralization on the "non-operating" public services equalization is not significant.