Analysis Of Regional Differences Of The Chinese Rural Public Goods Supply

Since the reform and opening up, China has been seeing enlarging regional economic disparities and the growing gap between urban and rural areas, and western rural areas become the focus where these two contradictions gather. During the "11th Five-Year Plan" period, China's government is facing tasks of coordinating urban and rural as well as regional development and building a well-off society, the most difficult part of which lie also in the western region and rural areas. It is an urgent problem to be explored how the western rural areas get rid of the backward status of development, and narrow the gap with the eastern developed rural areas. This paper researches the problem of regional disparities from the perspective of rural public goods. We argue that there exists an "cumulative cycling cause and result effect" in practice between regional disparities of China's rural public goods and that of economic development level. The western area's relatively backward provision level of rural public goods is not only an important cause that leads to the western area's lagging-behind compared with the eastern region, but also an obstacle for equitable achievement of human rights in the regional economic development. The article reviews changes of provision system of rural public goods since the founding of new China, makes an analysis of the current situation in the supply of rural public goods among the eastern, the middle and the western areas and the reasons for the status, and then put forth fundamental ideas to optimize the provision of rural public goods in the western area.The main framework of this paper includes four parts. The first part is the introduction, which explicitly expounds the purposes and significance of the topic and the following research, summarizes the current domestic and international research on rural public goods, and note that research methods running through the whole article are as follows: method of combination of theory and practice, method ofcombination of longitudinal historical comparison and horizontal regional comparison, method of combination of normative analysis and empirical analysis.In chapter 2, the research is located in the historic changes of rural public goods, and analyzes the institutional evolution that occurs in rural public goods since the founding of the new China by three periods (period of the people's commune, period from implementation of the household contract responsibility system to the rural tax-for-fee reform, period from the reform of rural taxes and fees till now). The significance of the historic study is to provide institutional backgrounds and historical roots for researching the current status and causes of regional disparities in rural public goods. In addition, this chapter also summarizes the overall problems in the supply of China's rural public goods, which set a macro background for the following specific research on regional differences.Chapter 3 turns to the reality, and makes an empirical study on the gap of rural public goods provision between eastern and western China taking rural basic education, rural public health, and rural infrastructures as an example. Studies reveal that the supply of rural public goods in China is characteristic of "high east, low west", and western rural public goods are lagging behind compared with the east regardless of the supply in terms of quantity, quality and the effect. The factors due are primarily as follows: constraints of the level of economic development; influences of non-agricultural industries; impacts of the existing financial transfer payment system; limits of natural conditions, locations and the ecological environment.Against the problem of significant regional gaps in the supply of rural public goods, chapter 4 contends that we should promote regional equity of rural public goods, which helps to narrow regional economic gaps and coordinate the regional development on one hand, and to show respect for people's equal human rights and achieve all-rounddevelopment of people on the other hand. Five major measures are put forth to optimize the provision of rural public goods in the western area in this chapter. The first is to accelerate the industrialization of agricultural operations and encourage the development of non-agricultural industries; The second is to construct a rural public goods supply system with a wide range of providers; The third is to reform the financial system in which responsibilities and financial rights don't match well, and build a scientific and reasonable financial transfer payment system; The fourth measure requires us to strengthen constructions of the local governments at the grassroots level, and establish public selection mechanisms in the supply of rural public goods; The last but not the least is to promote the ecological environment protection, and establish a scientific and reasonable mechanism for ecological compensation.On the whole, the main innovations of this paper lie in three aspects: First, we achieved the combination of longitudinal historic comparison and horizontal regional comparison in research methods, instead of the excessive longitudinal comparison and lack in horizontal comparison at the same time in the academic field. Moreover, detailed data are used to support the conclusion of the existence of regional disparities in rural public goods. Second, this paper makes it clear that there exists an "cumulative cycling cause and result effect" between regional disparities of China's rural public goods and that of economic development level, which urges us to explore narrowing regional gaps and realizing coordinated development from the angle of the optimization of western rural public goods; Third, an analysis of the significance of promoting regional fairness in the supply of rural public goods from the perspective of economic ethics embodies the scientific development concept and "people first" spirit of research.