Study On Performance Evaluation Of Supply Of Public Goods In Rural Areas

China has experienced great achievement after 30 years'reform and development in rural areas. However, a number of issues still remain unsolved, such as slow growth of agriculture economy, heavy peasant burden, rural poverty, and increasing in urban-rural income gap. The issues became a high priority on the social and political agenda and a series of policy measures have been adapted. Unfortunately, these measures did not appear to provide a long term solution.Some studies have been fiercely critical on inefficiency and ineffective in the rural public goods supply system and believed it is a fundamental cause of the rural poverty. In the other hand, there exists research who suggests an objective assessment on the performance of the rural public goods supply system.In view of the above, this thesis first reviews literature on public goods, rural public goods and its related supplying system. A number of weaknesses and shortfalls in the previous research are also highlighted. Following that, an innovative research design is initiated building upon previous theories and empirical results in the area.This thesis provides both theoretical and empirical examinations on the performance of the rural public goods supply system, both directly in terms of performance evaluation and indirectly in terms of economics evaluation. First, we evaluate the performance of the existing rural public goods supply system by developing a number of performance measures and utilizing a Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) based quadratic performance evaluation technique. Specifically, we evaluate productive and administrative efficiencies of the supplying system and provide empirical results using a panel data of Jiangxi rural areas.Second, we investigate the effect of the supplying system on rural economic development as well as the moralities of the supplying system. Using data over the period 1978-2006, we apply a number of empirical methods (i.e. unit root, co-integration and Granger causality tests) to investigate the impact of the rural public goods supply on rural economic development.Further, a Vector Autoregression (VAR) model is utilized to examine the relationship between rural productivity and investment on rural public goods. The measures considered in the VAR model includes rural productivity, investments on rural public goods, average cultivated land per capita and average rural investment per capita. In addition, a further investigation of impulse response function and variance decomposition provides robustness check on the results.Based on the above empirical results, policy analyses on the morality and equality of the existing supplying system and the consistency between the existing supply system and nation's development strategies are highlighted. We state that the existing rural public goods supply system is consistent with our nation's development strategies, however, the supply system appears to have some negative effects on peasants' rights and interests.The thesis is concluded by summarizing the empirical results observed. Based on these results accompanied by lessons and implications from international experiences on rural public goods supply, a number of policy suggestions on the improvement of performance efficiencies of rural public goods supply system are provided.