Education Voucher Plan: Institutional Character, Applicability And Revelations To China

After the end of the WWⅡ, in the sense of the expansionary Keynesianism, the western developed country built an ever-growing welfare plan by the help of economic growing. But in the 1970's, for the lost of the source of finance, the welfare state plans began to lose the supports. The reform of education is part of the reform of welfare state and government which supported by the people who had lost their patients to the bureaucracy and its professional management. It's necessary for our government in the process of modernizations that the review on this process.To simplify the discussion, this article try to focus on the most essential characters of education and spurn the jam caused by other unnecessary task that educations may has. Then this study tries to identity the pure intension of the education voucher plan and proves its correspondence with education and other similar areas with the same characters.With the production of human resource, education is one kind of investments. And there is an efficient limitation for this investment restricted by the needs of society. The traditional theory wrongly identifies the education provided by the government as a welfare which ignores the request according to the essential of education. This false approach is waste of money and cannot fulfill its work. In opposition, the voucher plan is designed to do the investment efficiently, that proves that the voucher plan is a good way of education.Even the voucher plan itself contains several variations. But their inbeing characters are the same. It means accept the independent consumers'—producers'decisions which can sufficiently express the consumers'benefit instead of the government's decision. But the voucher plan also needs the finance and directions of the government. In this study, I reviewed several reasons of the government interventions and reach some conclusions: usually, education cannot be classified as a public good; except some special situations, education creates no significant spillover benefits; for the human resource cannot be mortgaged, it's reasonable that a group of people may build a public education fund to average their income along the time line, the fact that parents finance their children's education is a example; and social justice and commonweal of education is other good reasons. But instead of government production, all the reasons above request no more than the government finance. The factors that make the market approach fail cannot be found in education that means the voucher plan is workable.On another hand, the government production approach in education has several shortcomings. First, when the government pays for the cost, consumers seem to willing to occupy more goods than they need. Second, the voting process blocks the consumers'expression of their benefits. The voucher plan can fix both of the shortcomings.Then the article focuses on the characteristics of the voucher plan.First, the good efficiency is thought to be one of the main advantages of the voucher plan. But the bureaucracy's efficiency can be improved through several ways. The market approach isn't always more efficient than the bureaucracy approach.But it's sure that: at first, the voucher plan will give the consumers the power to use the public education fund and create an education market; second, the consumers can full express their needs for education; third, this plan treat the public schools and private schools equally.Above all, the voucher plan isn't a pure market approach plan. It allows both the public and private investment in education. But the public fund can't be used in another area. This character effects in both ways. On one hand, it causes inefficiency. On anther hand, it increases the growing of an industry.The voucher plan integrates the public investment which is decided by the collective actions and the independent consumer decision. It is a new form of government production. And it fixes the requests of some special areas that need the government finance for public commonweal, such as education.