Weinan City Financial Funds Integration

In recent years, the central and local governments constantly increase the expenditure for "Three Agriculture" and the average annual growth of more than 60%; the big challenge is how to manage and make good use of financial fund for agriculture, and how to maximize the benefits of the limited financial resources, which need the practitioners and scholars'deep thinking. Because of the malfunction of traditional management system of financial expenditure for agriculture, the agricultural funds were managed through a "net and block" way and used in a decentralized way. The use and management of agricultural funds were supervised by many departments, so that the cost of management and transaction is higher, but with lower efficiency, which seriously affected policy effect and efficiency of the financial funds for agriculture. That means we need the integration of agricultural funds.Guided by the central and provincial policies, Weinan city increased the capital investment in agriculture, and the outcome of the integration of agricultural funds seems effective. Weinan government began first experiment of integration of agricultural funds in Dali County in 2006, then Pucheng county and Heyang county and Chengcheng county become experiment unit just before the policy of integration was implemented over the Weinan city. The annually integrated funds reached over 1 billion in 2008, which grow steeply up to 1.60 billion in 2009. This achievement greatly facilitated economical and social development in rural areas, speeded up the pace of new rural construction, and drove the social investment in agriculture.Although integration work has achieved the obvious economic and social benefits, but the work of integration is still facing many new situations, the new question, the new task accompanied by the rapid development of agriculture and rural economy, which put forward higher request to the financial departments. Under the guidance of the relevant theories about public finance, performance management, This study analyzed the general situation, innovation, and the main problems about integration work, we also analyzed the reasons of problems. At last, according to the experience of agricultural financial aid and program management both in mainland and overseas, we raised a proposal called "performance improvement by evaluation", which means that Weinan government should further improve and promote the performance evaluation system of integration of agriculture finance funds. This study suggested that obligation of different levels of governments should be revised; The policy makers should make sure the rural people can join in the whole process of budgeting and implementation; Third, a efficient regulation of performance management must be issued and implemented among all counties.This research mainly has three innovations; First, the author systematically examined the current situation of the integration of financial funds for agriculture in Weinan city, and analyzed the existing problems and reasons; Second, combined Performance management theory with public finance theory, proposed that the city government should apply the performance evaluation to improve performance of integration of agricultural finance funds. Third, through adopting by reference of the means utilized by the British Prime Minister Delivery Unit in public expenditure, this study pointed out that the real purpose of evaluation is to communicate with the objects and find the way of performance improvement.