The Research About The Development Of Participatory Budgeting In China's Local Governments

The core part of public budget is resource allocation. For a long time, the decision-making of resource allocation in public budget mainly made by the government and representative institutions under the different institutional arrangements, individual citizen do not directly participate in the public budget. During the late 20th century, the generation of "participatory budget" has changed the established picture, the citizens could participate in priority-setting of government expenditure. The participation of individual citizen which represents the different interests for different groups in public budget is being treated a new way of practice in local governance, which shows the great significance among politics, economy and society both on domestically and internationally.The study of this thesis starts from this question-- why the valuable participatory budget only carried out in a small part of low-level governments in China? First of all, this thesis concentrates on the discussion of international practice and experiences, then presents the difficulties and challenges of participatory budget that faces China's local governments, such as validity, sustainability and the fiscal difficulty. At the same time, the thesis analyzes what are the reasons caused these difficulties and challenges, then the author provides some suggestions to improve the development of participatory budget in China's local governments. For one hand, the local governments need to reform the current people's congress system and make sure the public mass represents their interests, in order to improve the further development of participatory budget. For the other hand, in terms of providing the precondition for participatory budget, the government should ventilate the public information then make the participatory budget becomes a voluntary behavior. Thirdly, the government should institutionalize the participatory budget in order to guarantee its sustainability. Fourthly, improve the implementation validity of participatory budget through the technical innovation, such as widen the participation channel and change the voting form. Finally, in order to provide the fiscal support for participatory budget, we should reform the present finance and administration system then transform the fiscal difficulties in county-level governments.