A Study On The Providers And Their Role In The Provision Of The Public Goods In Rural China

After the establishment of the household responsibility system, the provider of the rural public goods has transferred from the government only to the multiple parties of the government, the private sector, the community and the third-party sectors. The border and scope of each provider's role is different according to the efficiency and fairness standard. However, there are many problems in the provision of the rural public goods currently, such as the vague border of the providers, and even the absence of the providers, which lead to the low-level, low efficiency and unreasonable structure of the provision. The insufficient effective supply of the rural public goods has seriously damaged the sustainable development of both the peasants and the rural areas, which has also been one of the obstacles to the construction of a harmonious society. Therefore, the study on the problems of different providers in the supply of the rural public goods and the reasonable border of them, so as to construct a new public provision pattern that is both fair and efficient, will impose positive impact on the improvement of the effective provision of the rural public goods, on the narrowness of the urban-rural income gap and on the realization of the harmonious socialist society.At first, a brief review of the history of the provision of the rural public goods is given, what discovers a track of the providers: cooperation of the individual peasants→government only→multiple parties. Then, the three kinds of providers are analyzed and inspected in different perspectives. An analysis on the performance of government provision shows that the population movement and the level of industrialization has significantly negative effect on the efficiency of the governmental expenditure on the physical capital, so does the population movement and the level of economic development on the governmental human capital investment in the rural areas. It can be explained by the externalities caused by the population movement, which results in the low efficiency of the investment on local rural public goods, especially on the human capital. Therefore, the level of the investor of the rural human capital should be enhanced, and the central government should intensify its support for the basically public education, the development of human resource and the public health service in the net-flow-out areas. The provision of the individual peasant is analyzed in the perspective of institutional transition, and the mechanism of this kind of induced change is examined by some cases. The welfare effect analysis shows that the attribute of the rural public goods is natural monopoly and positive externality, which will lead to the loss of the gross social welfare if it is provided by the profit-maximization individual peasant. So, the government should monitor the prices and qualities of the public goods provided by the individual peasant as well as subsidize the basic consumption of the public goods. The focus of the community provision is "the plight of the collective action" in the "discuss one thing at one time" policy after the establishment of the household responsibility system, especially after the reform of the rural taxes and fees. Two cases in Hubei province suggest that strong reciprocity, external capital and the rural cooperative organizations based on the professional production in a limited scope will be the new providers of the rural public goods, and they will play a more and more important role. Base on the farmers' survey, an empirical analysis shows that the farmers' organizations and the agricultural dependence have significantly positive impact on the participation of the farmers.Finally, the factors that affect the choice of the providers of the public goods have been introduced generally. An analysis paradigm of transactional cost has been adopted to define the border of the providers theoretically. A discussion about the reasonable border between the government and the individual peasant suggests that the government should meet the basic demand and the individual should meet the extra demand. The border of the provision between the government and the community is defined by the comparison of the internal and the external transactional costs. At the end of the dissertation, a vision of a new pattern of the rural public goods provision, that is "government-led, market as the main and community as the complement", is recommended.