An Empirical Study On The Equalization Of Public Expenditure On Compulsory Education

Education is the cornerstone of national rejuvenation and development as well as social progress. The strategic goals in our educational reform is to seek the fair and excellent public education, which are general trends and expectations of peoples around the world, and to form the fair education benefiting all people, to establish a basic and public education service system covering rural and urban areas, an gradually realize the equalization of the basic and public education service system. Especially the equalization of our public education finance is the key step to achieve education equity. The paper chose the Western province Y in China, which is representative with the layout of big cities and vast rural areas, and quantitatively described the level of equalization of school finance in province Y, and then detect the factors and proposed reasonable suggestions, with realistic meaning and practice value.The study firstly defined the core concepts of “school finance” and “equalization”, especially discriminating “equalization” and “balance development”, and reviewing the relevant underlying theories. Secondly, collect the data of 41 counties in the province Y from 2008 to 2013 and interview data, and comprehensively use the methods of literature and investigation as well as statistic analysis, and based on the software of R and STATA as well as EXCEL, then, through the R cluster, specify the index system, which are per student national financial educational expenditures and per student educational utilities in budget as well as per student educational non-personnel expenditures in budget, and calculate the present situation of school finance. Further, this paper analyzed empirically the overall level and internal structure of public expenditure on compulsory education on two aspects of the disparities among regions, urban and rural areas, with the method of bivariate Theil index hierarchically and horizontally. And the paper also calculates the total gap with Gini coefficient, coefficient of variance, Mcloone index and Verstegen index; Analyzed the main reasons which affect the equalization of school finance expenditure; Proposed several relevant suggestions from macro-level as well as intermediate perspective and micro-level.Through the analysis of the present conditions above, the paper find that:(1)the true amount of school finance expenditure are increasing year by year, that is to say, per student national financial educational expenditures on primary school and junior high school are increasing both in dimensions and the growth rate is about 25%;(2)The gap between rural and urban areas is decreasing, because the rate of growth of rural areas is higher than that of urban areas;(3) the absolute gap among the regional areas is aggravating, because the absolute number of every indicator of southeast and northeast is far below that of west district.Through the measure of the level of equalization of school finance expenditure, the results show that:(1) the overall gap of the school finance expenditure is narrowing on a whole,with the expenditure on junior high school is presenting a narrow posture, however, the situation in primary school is not the same;(2) the disparities among regional areas are relatively stable, the level of regional inequality accounts for approximately 34.27% of the total disparity in junior high school and about 36.61% in primary school;(3)the disparities between rural and urban have reduced considerably since 2008, and it’s just a minimal difference by 2013, with junior high school contributing 0.03% and primary school 2.5%;(4) the gap of the inner rural and urban areas in the west district is the key factor to the restriction of the increasing variation of the integrated rural and urban areas, with 92.64% of the total gap of the integrated rural and urban areas in junior high school and 86.67% in the primary school;(5) Compared with the severe unbalance in the west district, the southeast and northeast areas in the province are in the low-level of balance,because the number of the bivariate Theil index is rather small.Based on the data analysis and existed literature research as well as investigation, there are five main reasons which affect the level of equalization of school finance expenditure. The first one is unequal economic level; the second one is inadequate policy support; the third one is unreasonable mechanism and system; the forth one is unsound performance assessment; the fifth one is imperfect laws and regulation.In order to promote the level of equalization of school finance expenditure, this paper suggested that improving the top-design from macro-level and strengthen the management of the provincial government from intermediate perspective as well as realize the duties of the local government from micro-level.This paper’s new ideas based on the application of methods of education statistics and measure.That is to say, with the method of R cluster, the paper gets the index system of school finance cost, and with the method of bivariate Theil index, the paper obtained the change trends of the level of equalization of school finance expenditure. However, the analysis of the factors which was affected by the policies in different districts is limited.