Study On The Implementation And Influence Of Chinese Basic Public Services

Socialism with Chinese characteristics has entered a new era and with that comes the transformation of the principal contradiction facing the Chinese society into the contradiction between the growing needs of the people for a better life and the unbalanced and inadequate development.The main solution to resolve this contradiction is implementing the people-oriented development concept and making people feel more satisfied.Promoting social development by focusing on safeguarding and improving people's livelihood and making people feel more satisfied aims to establish a sound basic public service system and promote the equalisation of basic public services in our country.At the same time,with the severe impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic,major measures such as ensuring the'six stability' and implementing the 'six guarantees' are required to solve the short-term outstanding problems.In addition,the sudden decline of birth rates and population ageing in China has become increasingly severe.In view of the different public needs and preferences of different age groups,implementing the inter-generational equalisation of basic public services is a top priority.Whether Chinese basic public services have made people feel more satisfied,how to evaluate its impact and mechanism of action is a key issue China must face in the development of the new era.With China's goal of 'making people feel more satisfied,it is worth discussing whether the implementation evaluation system for basic public services built is heterogeneous among different age groups,which would otherwise result in inequality among generations.And this dissertation aims to find answers to these two questions.Research on basic public services and equalisation has generated numerous findings,which are beneficial for us as reference.However,their deficiencies and parts for improvement are also revealed.First,the existing pieces of literature usually evaluate the policy effects of basic public services under the framework of neoclassical economics or public choice theory,both of which are based on the research of the material paradigm and fail to fully consider residents as beneficiaries of basic public services.However,New China's fundamental fiscal theory from the perspective of national governance requires full emphasis on the'people-oriented' and 'public' features of government functions.Secondly,there are limited systematic and comprehensive evaluation systems for the effects of basic public service policies.Existing studies are all based on the effect evaluation of a single policy at the macro-social level,such as the effect of economic growth.In contrast,the empirical research on systematically constructing an evaluation system at the micro-level is relatively scarce.Finally,there is only a little literature on the equalisation of basic public services in the inter-generational sense,and most of the literature examines the balance of basic public services between urban and rural areas and among regions.On account of the above-mentioned research purpose and the deficiencies in previous works of literature,this dissertation probes into the policy implementation and influence of basic public services and attempts to study from the following aspects.First,the narration of facts and features and international comparison centred on the supply level and distribution pattern of Chinese basic public services are conducted separately from the dimensions of time and space,with the help of the provincial panel and OECD country data in single public service supply,general level,fiscal expenditure and supply-demand matching.Meanwhile,in virtue of CGSS micro-survey data,a targeted comparative analysis of the perception and evaluation of residents of different age groups on the benefits of basic public services is carried out.And then based on that,in accordance with Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and the fundamental fiscal theory of New China,a set of basic public service implementation evaluation systems aiming to make people feel more satisfied is constructed,including effects of income redistribution,stratum mobility,equity and public participation.Finally,it conducts an empirical test,mechanism discussion and analysis of generational differences on the above-mentioned four effects of basic public services and proposes policy recommendations on how to make people feel more satisfied and achieve inter-generational equalisation in Chinese basic public services based on research findings.Empirical research brings forth the main content and conclusions of this dissertation.These chapters empirically test the impacts of basic public services on income,stratum mobility,equity and public participation,respectively.First,considering the income redistribution effect,this dissertation constructs a GMM model similar to DID on nested panel data of the provincial finance and CFPS from 2009 to 2017,showing that public expenditure in China can simultaneously promote household income growth and redistribution and the benefits of basic public services among different age groups are different.Second,for effects of stratum mobility,this dissertation establishes a Logit model by measuring stratum mobility and inheritance index on CGSS2015 data and the education expenditure of school-age children on provincial fiscal data from1961 to 2006,demonstrating that Chinese public education services can promote inter-generational stratum mobility and weaken stratum consolidation brought about by the parental background.Among them,those born in the 1980 s and 1990 s receive more marginal benefits from public education services.Third,this dissertation builds Probit,Heckman and multi-period DID models by measuring and drawing the Gini coefficient,MT index,Lorentz curve,concentration index and curve on CFPS data from 2012 to 2018 to measure the fair effects.The result indicates that healthcare insurance can effectively improve people's satisfaction with basic medical and health services,and its reimbursement system can narrow the income gap among residents caused by medical expenditures.However,the true probability of hospitalisation for residents with lower incomes and poor self-rated health is decreasing,as well as their medical expenditure and medical insurance reimbursement.Further analysis found that the fair effect of China's basic medical and health services is not balanced across generations.Obviously,elderly people enjoy objective and relative fairness,while objective absolute fairness and subjective fairness are more determined by the beneficiaries.Fourth,on the effect of public participation,this dissertation constructs an OLS model on the microdata of CGSS2010 and the provincial fiscal expenditure data from 1949 to 2006,demonstrating that basic education services have a certain positive impact on residents' public awareness,which does not significantly diminish with the increase in income or education level.However,in terms of public participation,basic education services fail to encourage residents to participate more actively in voting and instead subjectively improve residents' awareness of participation,expressing their opinions more actively.