| Since the birth date of government, wavelike expansion of government size never suspended. Especially, almost all governments had experienced a distinct expansion during the era of industrialization, which led to corruption, government inefficiency, excessive budget deficits and some other problems. In the late 70s and early 80s of last century, the "new public management" movement was launched by most of western counties in order to reduce the size of government, and most countries achieved remarkable results. During the China's government reform process, streamlining the organization and controlling the government size were also the idea and target of the reform, but the substantive results are not obvious enough.The introduction of this thesis raises the issue of government size by introducing the "new public management" movement, and outlines this paper's structure and further research. The first chapter defines two core concepts: administrative expenditure and government size, reviews some previous research, and briefly introduces the evolution and development of the concept of government size. This is the research platform for this paper. The second chapter analyzes the status and development of China's general government size, argues that the general government size was stable in the period of planned economy, but expanded significantly after the reform and opening up. This expansion mainly caused by the local government. Because of the existence of extra-budgetary funds, the actual government size was even greater, but the administrative expenditure from extra-budgetary funds is not significant compared to which from budgetary outlays. Chapter III analyzes the regional distribution and differences of administrative expenditures of local governments at the level of province, and the correlation between local government scale and indicators of income levels, urbanization levels, industrialization levels and population density. And simply discusses the reasons for rapid expansion of the local government size from the perspectives of government function expanse, local government competition, traditional cultures and the financial systems. Chapter IV simply compares China with some major countries from the point of administrative expenditures, and from the perspective of the number of government employees and their total wages and salaries, reaches the conclusion that the government size of China is moderate. In addition to summing up the preceding chapter, chapter V briefly analyzes the structure of government expenditures, as well as the ideas and direction of China's government reform. |
