An Empirical Study On The Effect Of Provincial Officials' Characteristics On The Education Input In China

After the Reform and Opening in 1978,China's achievements in economic construction cannot be separated from the national policies implemented in the economic and political fields.In the economic field,local governments have gradually shared more power from the central government and gained the capacity to control the financial sector due to the financial system reform.In the political sphere,the central government has the power to appoint and remove local officials.The political tournament theory holds that there is a mechanism for the promotion of officials with economic growth as the main content of assessment.Although such a system has improved the rapid economic development in various regions,it has some negative impacts.Local governments have focused on economic construction in public spending and lightened public services.Some scholars have found that the personal characteristics of officials would affect local construction expenditures.Education investment is a part of the public expenditure and it is listed in the local government's budget with economic construction.Therefore,a reasonable inference is that the personal characteristics of provincial officials have an impact on the education investment in their province.This paper will select the provincial officials'origin,source and academic qualifications,and verify the impact of provincial officials' characteristics on educational investment.The reason why education investment is selected as the research topic is that education has the nature of public goods and requires the government to bear certain responsibilities,and the time lag and time accumulation of education make it difficult for education investment to improve economic growth simultaneously.Officials who focus on promotion incentives may overlook education investment.Secondly,we have entered a new era.The importance of knowledge and talent has become more essential in the realization of the Chinese dream of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation,and thus the role of education has become more prominent.Thirdly,the current China's investment in education is still insufficient.Compared with OECD countries,the share of basic education expenditure in basic is relatively low,and public investment in basic education is weak.Therefore,this paper selects five indicators to measure educational investment:the growth rate of fiscal education funds,the growth rate of budgetary education funds,the growth rate of non-budgetary funds,the growth rate of school land occupation,and the proportion of the number of primary and middle school students and the local permanent population.After recalling existing research about the characteristics of provincial officials on educational investment,this paper proposes the following assumptions that provincial officials' birthplace can have a positive impact on education investment,and provincial officials from the central government have a positive influence on education investment.Because of the heterogeneity of the provincial party committee secretary and the governor,the models were constructed separately for testing.The database includes the data of provincial officials in 31 provinces from 2005 to 2015.After researching this article found that the provincial party committee secretary working in his birthplace has a positive influence on the education investment in the province.The secretary of the provincial party committee tends to adjust the financial education budget and the budgetary education funds to influence education.When the provincial party secretary returns to work at the place of his country of origin,he can guarantee the proportion of students enrolled in local compulsory education.when the provincial party committee secretary comes from the central government,they usually reduce the investment in education and show a significant negative correlation with the growth rate of the school area.Compared with the provincial party committee secretary,the provincial governor's birthplace variable does not have significant investment in education funding,and the growth rate of the school's area is not significant.when the governor came from the central government,the growth rate of the school's land occupation declined even more.