Study On The Supply Efficiency Of Rural Public Goods From The Perspective Of Farmers’ Satisfaction

With the continuous moving forward on balancing urban and rural development, theissue about the supply of rural public goods is being regarded increasingly. It not only relatesto the development of the agriculture, the rural areas, and the farmers themselves, but alsoaffects the construction of the harmonious socialist society. This article which is based on thefield investigation into the situation of road and water infrastructure in4districts8villages ofChongqing during March to July,2011, adopts the empirical research and statistical analysismethods, analyzes particularly the basic situation of supply and supply efficiency of ruralpublic goods, as well as the influencing factors of supply efficiency.This paper consists of four parts. The first part is the introduction which introduces somebasic questions of the study. The second part is the analysis about the situation of supply andsupply efficiency of rural public goods. This part takes the investigation in Chongqing forexample, and describes the basic situation of supply and supply efficiency of rural publicgoods in China. The third part is the analysis about the influencing factors of supplyefficiency of rural public goods. This part separately discusses five factors’ influence on thesupply efficiency, and the five factors are the gap between supply and demand of rural publicgoods, the price level of rural public goods, the supply institution of rural public goods, themental comparison of farmers, the individual differences of farmers. The last part is theconclusion, which summarizes the main research results of the paper.Through the research, we find that the basic status quo of the supply of public goods inrural China could be summarized as follows: the supply of the rural public goods is still inshort, especially the supply of both the productive rural public goods which are urgent neededby farmers and the public goods involved in the rural sustainable development is seriously inshort. Though the field research and data analysis of sample villages in Chongqing, the writerfind that the supply of rural public goods in Chongqing which has been improved in recentyears is still in short on the whole, and there is a big supply and demand gap in the supply ofrural road and water infrastructure. Accordingly, the level of farmers’ satisfaction with thesupply status of rural road and water infrastructure overall is not high. But relatively, the levelof farmers’ satisfaction with the service of domestic water is the highest, the level of their satisfaction with the service of irrigation is the lowest, and most farmers express theirdissatisfaction with the service of irrigation. That is to say, from the view of the supplyefficiency, the supply efficiency of rural public goods in Chongqing which is different indifferent regions is still on the low side overall, and the supply efficiency of the irrigationinfrastructure is relatively the lowest, the supply efficiency of the rural road and domesticwater infrastructure is relatively high, among them, the latter is slightly higher than theformer.After the study of determinants of the supply efficiency, we can find that the supply anddemand gap, the price level, the supply institution of rural public goods, and the farmers’mental comparison have important effect on the supply efficiency of rural public goods. Thesmaller the supply and demand gap in quality and quantity becomes, the lower the price levelis, the better the farmers’ demand expression in supply system becomes, the more frequentlythe government consults the farmers’ opinions in decision-making, the more the fund raisingreduces the farmers’ cost burden, the better the maintenance of public goods is done, the moreincreasingly the government strengthens the surveillance of construction fund, the better thefarmers feel the supply situation is both than the past and than the other villages inneighboring districts, the higher the level of farmers’ satisfaction with rural public goods is.In addition, the farmers’ personal characteristics such as sex, degree of education, theproportion of the members of Communist Party and cadres in family, have different effect ondifferent kinds of rural public goods, however, such as age, whether or not went out for work,the level of family income per head, have no notable influence on the supply efficiency ofrural public goods.