Basic Public Services Output Performance Of China

Since Tibeot proposed fiscal decentralization theory, the traditional Western view generally believed that decentralization has a strong incentive effect on the supply of basic public services, thus contributing to improving basic public services output efficiency and effectiveness. Therefore, in practice, decentralization has also been widely used in various countries of the world. Since the China’s tax system reform in 1994, China has been actively promoting the reform of fiscal decentralization, but China’s current development of basic public services is not satisfactory, the inadequate supply of basic public services from the local government, inter-regional basic public services inequality is still very serious. Why excitation China’s fiscal decentralization system for the supply of basic public services is so limited? Is the reason that since the beginning of the birth itself,China’s fiscal decentralization system has limitations or the degree of decentralization in China is not high enough? With this question, this article carried out relevant research on output performance of essential public services from the perspective of fiscal decentralization, hoping to get some useful conclusions.The impact of fiscal decentralization on basic public services output performance will unfold in three ways. Firstly,focuses on the current situation of fiscal decentralization. This paper uses the indicator method, which is three types of commonly used indicators measuring the degree of fiscal decentralization were added to the total, the purpose is to estimates of the degree of fiscal decentralization in China more scientific and comprehensive. According to estimates of the degree of fiscal decentralization of the country’s 31 provinces, we found that the current overall level of fiscal decentralization isn’t high enough which there is a certain gap to the optimal fiscal decentralization that some scholars believe. A degree of fiscal decentralization of inter-regional and intra-regional is unequal, wherein the overall fiscal decentralization development of the eastern region is best, but the gap between the eastern provinces is also greatest, but fiscal decentralization developed central and western regions is poor. Then, we selected three main basic public services output indicators to assess output performance of basic public services of China’s 31 provinces between 2004--2014 in the method of Comprehensive Index, in order to evaluate the development of essential public services Level. The study found the level of basic public services is improving, but the pace of development is slow. By measuring the coefficient of Theil we found our basic public services gap is decreasing, but there is still a great gap between the three regions. At last, we analyzed the affection between fiscal decentralization and the basic public services output performance with panel data regression model and found that the impact of fiscal decentralization on basic public services output performance is an inverted U-shaped features, too high or too low fiscal decentralization is both not conducive to the supply of basic public services, namely there is an "optimal solution" to the impact of fiscal decentralization on basic public services output performance, but also for different types of basic public services, "the best solution" not the same, which gives us a lesson that is different fiscal policy can be taken for the supply of different basic public services.