A Fairness Study On ECE's Financial Investment Based On The Provincial Data

In the outlook of 2010, the early childhood education (ECE) has attracted great attention. It is the beginning of lifetime study as well as a essential part of the whole system. The current financial appropriation focuses on some public kindergartens in cities; an inequity exists among different areas and different kindergartens. This research is to make a full survey with the econometric data.This study attempts to answer the related three questions: the current situation of the benefit incidence; the reason of inequity; the design of cost-sharing mechanism. The study consists of five parts. The first part introduces the topic, the perspective and the design of the research. This part defines the cost of ECE, which is the opportunity cost, meeting the basic demand. It focuses on the comparison of the ECE and high education in the body and criterion of cost-sharing. The analysis deduces the equity is the top principal of cost-sharing.The second part is a benefit incidence analysis of the ECE. The current researches prefer the theoretic study, which lack the reality basis. So there are two equity indexes in the paper: EPI and ESI, which describe the benefit incidence situation in various areas and the trend of year 2003 to 2008. Then it analyzes the reality from theoretic perspective.The third part is a reason analyze of the benefit incidence. According to the recent studies, there is no research about the ECE's benefit incidence reason. In the model, I give detailed theoretic analysis of each factor which comes from the similar models, trying to enhance the model's preciseness, ensure its objectivity. According to result of model, the revealed preference of the government is the key point of the equity.The forth part is the core of the paper. There're three question of the mechanism design: how much is the amount of appropriation; the design of transfer system; how to fix the unfair financial policy. In this part, I estimate the cost of per student, and use the average amount of provinces, which is sorted by the GDP, as the cost of corresponding level kindergartens. Each kindergarten gets the same appropriation, regardless of their characteristics. Then we calculate the gap between demand and reality. We can set a fair cost-sharing mechanism with horizontal and vertical appropriation, as well as the subsidy project of ECE.Combining the all data and analysis, we get the following conclusions: the government should play a more active role and increase the appropriation; we need to fix the unfair financial policies; the government should ensure that the appropriation budget meet the fundamental needs and provide compensated assistance for the poor kids; a horizontal and vertical appropriation system is preferred. At the end, we should establish a cost-sharing mechanism in the equity perspective.