The Impact Of County-Level Financial Investment On Performance Of Education Expenditure

Education funds are the material foundation of educational development,performance evaluation is investment to the future.Since 2012,China has achieved the goal of fiscal expenditure on education accounted for 4 percent of GDP for eight consecutive years.However,with the change of internal and external environment and the transformation of social economy,it is unsustainable to promote the development of education solely based on the expansion of the financial investment scale.It is imperative to improve the performance of education funds and fulfill the promise of “running education that people satisfied”.Meanwhile,the county government plays an extremely important role in China’s administrative level and financial investment system of education.Based on the imbalance of the regional economy,as well as the strategic deployment and top-level planning of comprehensive implementation of budget performance management,it is an inevitable and important issue to explore the relationship between county-level financial investment and the performance of education funds.According to the theoretical methods of regional development and educational development,fiscal decentralization,and expenditure performance evaluation,sorting out China’s education funds investment system and current situation,combining the method of normative research and empirical research,case study and quantitative research,based on the pre-research of the three representative counties,the national education development plan and the requirements of comprehensive implementation of performance management,as a special case of analytic hierarchy process,we construct a county-level financial investment index system including investment capacity,investment scale,and investment structure as first-level indexes,and the education expenditure performance evaluation index system including expenditure decision-making,process supervision,goal realization,and social satisfaction as first-level indexes.Furthermore,we conduct an empirical evaluation of education funds performance of in all 121 counties(cities,districts,the number of administrative regions in the year)of 2017 in Guangdong,and conduct a regression analysis of the relationshipbetween financial investment and the education funds performance.The results show that the overall level of education funds performance and the public education satisfaction of Guangdong Province is not high;the comprehensive index of education financial investment was positively correlated with education funds,that is,generally,the more investment in education,the higher the education funds performance will be;besides the public education satisfaction did not match the level of education financial investment;the county-level government’s financial ability and the scale of fiscal expenditure on education are positively related to education funds performance,as well as the proportion of high school education finance in basic education finance.The causes of the results above are complex and also provoke questions,from the perspective of multi-factor interaction,mainly lies in: the current financial system requires county-level governments to bear important educational expenditure responsibility,but the financial resources of counties at different regions vary greatly;although benchmark competition and administrative constraints can ensure to complete the “mission”,but actually they can not be sustainable and will generate new problems;the unreasonable and imperfect distribution mechanism of education funds has caused the imbalance of the distribution structure of education funds and increased the imbalance of education development;county-level government’s financial efficiency restricts the efficiency of educational funds expenditure;the division of county-level financial investment,insufficiency supply of high-quality basic education and high expectations of educational products have created a gap,which reduces public education satisfaction.If the phenomenon could not be improved,it will affect the effective supply of educational products,the balanced development of education,sustainable development of education,and the public’s sense of identity and satisfaction with basic education.Financial performance evaluation is a methodology for finding and solving problems.From the perspective of “tool-value”,there are problems such as: obvious gaps in educational development areas in different region of Guangdong,low public education satisfaction,and various structural contradictions.To promote the development of basic education andmaximize the performance of education funds,we should deepen the reform of financial investment system in education to optimize the allocation of resources through structural adjustments,focus on the education of underdeveloped counties and low-income groups and migrant population’s demand,improve the level of fine-grained management of education funds,and gradually move up the responsibility for fiscal expenditure based on actual conditions,promote the equally supply of basic education nationwide,while increasing financial investment.This paper builds a county-level fiscal investment index system and education funds performance evaluation index system,that is to examine the quantitative relationship between financial investment and education funds performance from the perspective of financial performance evaluation and county-level finance.This paper obtains an education satisfaction survey of more than 20,000 samples in Guangdong Province,tries to innovate in the concept and data source,and proposes that the investment system should be reformed to maximize educational expenditure performance,and the responsibility of basic education supply and financial expenditure should be moved up.However,due to the limitation of data source,the study failed to make a historical comparison,and the interpretation of empirical results lacked a more systematic theoretical height,which is a problem that should be paid more attention to in future studies.