A Study On Educational Expenditure Performance Of Local Governments In China

Education is very important as the security of the development and of one nation. Many countries take education and human resource development as a significant strategy after the financial crisis, and actively establish education reform program, make great efforts to attract senior talents in basic research, technology, management and other fields. In the 21st century talent competition is more fierce. It is precisely aware of that"strengthen education first before make one nation strong". Only developing advanced education, science and technology can be the dominant power to make one nation more competitive in the world, therefore, education now bears an extremely important historical mission.Since the 1980s, education management system in China has undergone an obvious adjustment. China implements basic education under local government's management, senior education, under central and local governments'co-management, investment in education is increasingly depends on local government. Therefore, it is concerned that how about the performance of the local government's huge expenditure on education. Anyway, this study will analyze the issues mentioned above.The whole thesis is divided into five parts:The first part is the introduction, describing the research background, significance of the topic, related literature reviews, research ideas, structure and creative points.Chapter 1 introduces the concept of public education expenditure, fiscal education-related economic theory and performance analysis, furthermore, illustrates the theoretical basis of educational expenditure performance of local governments in China. Among them, the introduction of endogenous growth theory and human capital theory is the basic theory to analyze educational expenditure performance. It clarifies the basic concept of the performance analysis through gradual introduction of the concepts of the performance, public expenditure performance, public expenditure on education. Chapter 2 describes the historical background of fiscal education in China and the scale and structure of the local government expenditure on education by the analyzing means of combination of history and reality. Since the establishment of the People's Republic in 1949, the education management system has experienced two stages, and finally it is established the structure of education funding by the local governments, other sectors and individuals. Then, the thesis analyzes the scale features of local government expenditure on education in six regions in China, including 31 provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities by using the absolute and relative indicators, and then, analyzes the structural features of local government expenditure on education by adopting average expenditure index of local government expenditure on education of different grades.Chapter 3, on the base of explaining the indicator system of performance of public expenditure on education, analyzes economic and social performance of local governments'public expenditure on education in China. This thesis uses Panel Data model and selects"local public expenditure on education to local economic growth rate"as the main indicator to analyze the economic performance of Chinese local government expenditure on education; Furthermore, selects"the number of the students of higher education in the school / one hundred thousand people"and"compulsory education level"as the main indicators of social performance. And then it points out the problems of the local government expenditure on education as follows: First, the total expenditure on education of Chinese local government is not adequate, and the gap among regions and different areas within the region is large, to the lack of internal disparities across regions and regional disparities; Second, the Chinese local government expenditure structure on education is irrational; Third, the gap of educational expenditure performance of local governments in China in different regions is obvious.Chapter 4, this part proposes policy recommendations pertraining to those problems discovered in Chapter 3: First, increase the local government expenditure on education; Second, optimize the structure of the local government expenditure on education; Third, balance development in different regions.This thesis aims to point out the problems of education expenditure of local governments in China, and then recommends proposals and policies to improve the performance of local government expenditure on education, so as to achieve the optimal allocation by making good use of limit fiscal capital of local governments, to keep the Chinese education rapid development, sound running of the government finance, and coordinating and sustainable development of economy and society.