Social Capital, Income Inequality And Rural Public Goods Availability

Rural public goods is the promoter of rural economic development. Rural areas would have the greater demand for public goods if they want a more rapid economic development. But now, for the cause of the uneven distribution of resources between urban and rural areas and the supply mode of rural public product, the public goods supply in rural areas has always been difficult to meet the needs of the development. Even in some rural areas, some farmers cannot obtain or not use equally rural public goods, resulting in that rural public goods availability is low. In the context of insufficient supply of rural public goods, the lower rural public goods availability will largely influence the development of rural areas economic. So to explore the factors that influencing rural public product availability is necessary to improve the level of rural public goods availability, to improve the effect of rural public supply and to protect the rights and interests of farmers.Theories and practices have proved that social capital can influence the rights and interests of farmers. The income inequality will also affect resource allocation in different income groups. And as a kind of rights and interests of farmers, rural public goods will be essentially affected by social capital and income inequality.So this paper study the rural public goods availability in the perspective of social capital and income inequality,.On the basis of summarizing and analyzing the related literature at home and abroad, this paper firstly determines the direction, the ideas and the methods of the study. Then this paper states the definition of rural public goods, social capital, income inequality and rural public goods availability. Secondly, this paper builds the theoretical framework, and elaborates that how social capital and income inequality affect the rural public goods availability. Then, on the basis of comparative analysis on the different measurement of social capital and income inequality, this paper divided social capital into social network, social trust and collective action which are represented by a single index respectively. And the income inequality is characterized by gini coefficient and the rural public goods is represented by “whether you can enjoy the public goods in your village”. This paper also selects some control variables based on the layer of villages, households and farmers. Then this paper put forward the hypothesis and builds a binary Logit model. And then this paper takes the data of 100 villages in Henan, Shaanxi, Ningxia, Inner Mongolia and Shandong for the empirical analysis of how social capital and income inequality affect the rural public goods availability. And then this paper make a robustness test. Last, according to the empirical conclusion this paper put forward related policies and Suggestions.Through the data and empirical analysis, this paper found that:(1)The farmer’s social capital is relatively weak in general. The score of social network and collective action is low and social trust has the highest score. The gini coefficient of 82% of the villages surveyed is in the controllable range of 0.2 to 0.4.(2) 9.5% of farmers surveyed has a low rural public availability, and the availability of road traffic and water conservancy facilities is the lowest.(3) Social network has significant negative effect on rural public goods availability. Collective action has significant positive effect. Social trust has no significant effect. Social capital has positive effect on availability mainly by collective action. Income inequality has significant negative effect on availability.(4) Social capital and income inequality have weak interaction and both of them can restrain each other. Also, this interaction has greater effect on social capital than on income inequality.