Research On The Supply-Demand Matching Degree Of Public Services In New Rural Communities And Its Determinants

The construction of rural public services has always been a pain point of rural modernization in urban-rural duality.As a government-led community mainly formed of “A union community of multiple villages”,the new rural community(NRC)provides an institutional bridging platform.The emergence of NRC results from the administrative society’s reconfiguration of village space and order to achieve the redistribution of public interests.However,there are different degrees of imbalance between the supply and demand of public services in NRC,such as the productivity paradox of oversupply of livelihood services and face-saving projects,which deviates from the original purpose of establishing NRC for resource pooling.It reflects the inability of the public system to accept,accommodate,and resettle social heterogeneity and divided interests against the backdrop of the challenge of diversified needs caused by social leaps.How the NRC plays the intermediary role as an institutional platform is the key to properly dealing with the structural tensions and divergence of interests in a pluralistic society and is also a search and answer to the two major issues of the modern public administration study--“efficiency” and “publicness”.Reviewing the current situation of matching supply and demand for public services in NRC and improving the effectiveness of public service supply are the keys to improving the public service system in NRC and solving the dilemma of social resource allocation in the context of multiple interests.It leads to several core questions:How to measure the Supply-Demand Matching Degree(SDMD)of public services in new rural communities? What are the factors influencing the SDMD of public services in NRCs? How to improve the SDMD of public services in NRCs?Based on the theory of government failure,the theory of supply-demand balance,and the data governance theory,the study adopts social survey,mathematical and statistical analysis,and empirical research methods to investigate the SDMD of public service in NRC and its determinants.According to existing literatures on community public service evaluation,and the government’s urban and rural community service planning documents,the NRC public service evaluation index system is constructed and combined with Marx’s classification of the levels of human social existence and development.The NRC public services are classified into three levels: survival,development,and enjoyment,including community safety and environment,community social security,community agricultural production,community government affairs,legal services,community information services,and community information services.These services include community safety and environment,community social security,agricultural production,government,legal services,information services,community living services,community recreation,sports,etc.Based on the supply-demand balance theory and the supply-demand function in economics,the linear relationship between supply and demand is used to derive the trigonometric formulaλ=cos(|arctan(D/Q)-45°|)* sign(D-Q)for the SDMD.By stratified sampling of GDP values of each city in Sichuan Province with simple random sampling at the level of lower districts(counties),towns,and townships,36 NRCs were selected,and questionnaires were administered to 2880 residents in them.The data from2253 valid questionnaires were measured for the SDMD of community services in NRC.The results showed that the overall matching level of public service supply and demand in NRC was “Medium-High”,but the matching situation in each region was uneven,and there was a positive correlation between the degree of regional economic development and the SDMD.In terms of regional differences and differences in service categories,the community public service matching model has high discriminatory power and can provide effective feedback on the deviations in supply and demand of public services in various regions and categories;in terms of the SDMD of specific community public services,the supply of community agricultural production and community recreation and sports services is more severe than the demand,and the supply of agricultural production facilities and agricultural marketing guidance services in some regions deviates most seriously from the demand,followed by community cultural venues and activities and public sports venues and activities,in addition to the supply of basic labor and employment security services.In addition,the SDMD of basic labor and employment security services also has a significant deviation.Based on the theory of government failure and previous related studies,the research hypothesis of the factors influencing the SDMD of public services in NRCs is proposed,and a structural equation model of the influencing factors is constructed.The parameter estimation results of the model run on the factors influencing the SDMD show that “government resource input,” “government importance,” “community public service production performance”,“project awareness”,“effectiveness of expression”,“information mastery” and other six factors have a positive and significant effect on the SDMD of public services in NRC.In the mediating effect test,the six factors of “project awareness”,“effectiveness of expression,” and “information mastery” have a positive and significant effect on the SDMD of public service in NRC.In the mediation effect test,“public service production performance” had a mediating effect between“degree of government attention” and “matching demand and supply”.“The effectiveness of expression and the degree of information acquisition had a mediating chain effect between the degree of project awareness and the SDMD.The other two factors,“perfection of supervision mechanism” and “trust in service”,did not significantly affect the SDMD.9 of the 11 hypotheses were true,and 2 were not.Based on the results of the empirical analysis,we propose policy recommendations to improve the SDMD for public services in NRC from the perspective of supply and demand.From the supply perspective,firstly,we need to improve the level of public service supply in NRC.Secondly,it has to enhance the precision of public service supply in NRC.Thirdly,we must grasp the priority order of public service project supply in NRC.Lastly,the government needs to strengthen the diversified allocation of public service supply in NRC.From the perspective of demand,firstly,the community has to establish a mechanism for identifying the needs of residents in NRC.Secondly,the local government must establish a platform for expressing the needs of residents in NRC.Thirdly,NRC residents must be mobilized to participate in community service.Finally,the cultural identity of NRC residents should also be enhanced.The study on the SDMD of public services and the determinants of NRC is an efficiency revision guided by publicness in the context of diversified and divided interests.It is an expression of administrative and social governance techniques,which is expected to reshape community ties in the new village space by reallocating limited resources.Its academic contributions are followed.Firstly,this study establishes an index system for evaluating public services in NRC from the dimension of “quantity” and deriving a trigonometric formula for measuring the match between supply and demand,which brings a new perspective and measurement tools for examining the match between supply and demand of public services in NRC.Then,develop a methodology for evaluating public services in NRC in a community-wide public service environment with high model tolerance.Secondly,in the context of a full-category community public service environment and high model tolerance,the empirical analysis of the influencing factors reveals that the importance of supervision mechanism and public service trust in the matching of supply and demand is not as expected in the previous literature,while the effectiveness of expression and the degree of information mastery have a strong chain mediating role in the model.Thirdly,this study proposes a new strategy to optimize the supply and demand matching of public services in NRCs from both the supply and demand sides,enhance the accuracy of community public service supply utilizing multi-collaboration and data,establish a priority list of community public service supply based on comprehensive consideration of residents’ demand and financial level,and realize the dynamic adjustment of community public services through demand identification process control.