The Impact Mechanism And Evaluation Of The Inclusiveness Of Rural Infrastructure In China On The Basis Of Its Whole Life Cycle

The problem of the three issues(agriculture,rural areas,and farmers)is the most concerning challenge in China.China’s economic growth has exhibited strong development accompanied by the widening of the gap between urban and rural areas,the slow economic progress in rural areas,and unfair income distribution between the said areas.For a long time,rural area development has lagged behind that of urban counterparts.By acting on economic growth and income distribution,rural infrastructure plays a positive role in reducing the urban–rural gap and in promoting poverty reduction.At the macro level,investment in and the construction of rural infrastructure is the material foundation of rural economic development,and infrastructure investment and construction in different regions are closely related to economic development and social equity.The differentiation of urban and rural infrastructure will further widen the gap between urban and rural economic development and lead to social injustice.At the micro level,the investment in and construction and operation of rural infrastructure are related to the actual needs of each farmer and the improvement of the quality of life.With the transformation of the major contradiction in China\s society,the farmers expectations for a better life are constantly raised and higher demands are put forward in relation to production and living environments.The realization of these demands depends on sound,appropriate,and upgraded rural infrastructure.Realize the balanced development of rural infrastructure construction and doing so with consideration to efficiency and fairness is a major practical issue.China’s rural infrastructure construction attained great achievements in recent years,such as the “every village road project,” “rural living environment renovation three-year plan,” and “rural safe drinking water project.” Rural infrastructure improved the quality of life of farmers,enhanced the efficiency of agriculture,and promoted the local economic development at the same time.The implementation of these infrastructure projects generated remarkable successes.However,some farmers cannot fully benefit from these endeavors,and certain rural environmental protection infrastructures cannot be used because farmers are not willing to pay for drinking water or given the absence of social capital investment in rural infrastructure.Compared with its urban counterpart,rural infrastructure has lower supply quantity,lower quality,unoptimized structure,does not fully support the full development its focal area,and fails to provide farmers with a better life.Therefore,in the central rural work conference in 2020,strengthening the rural infrastructure construction is one of the emphases for implementing the strategy of rejuvenating the country.Specifically,rural construction,as mentioned in the meeting action,should continue to focus on rural public infrastructure construction to promote sustained equal basic public services between urban and rural areas,and highlight the fortification of the construction of resistance out basic livelihood of the people.Universality out fundamental means can’t make a farmer left behind,want to let each farmer fair and enjoy the rural economic development achievement,this also for the development of rural infrastructure construction,which indicates that the new policy goals.Therefore,people-centered rural infrastructure development must follow the law of inclusive social development.What is inclusive development? How can we achieve inclusive development through rural infrastructure? How can we improve the management of rural infrastructure in relation to its entire life cycle to achieve better efficiency? To resolve these practical issues,the core approach involves scientifically evaluating the inclusiveness level of the entire life cycle of rural infrastructure.As the literature on the influence mechanism of the inclusive development of rural infrastructure remains in a certain perspective or a certain level,the lack of a systemic research measurement system worsens.First,no systematic evaluation and supervision system exists in the field of rural infrastructure.The evaluation and management of rural infrastructure often refers to the evaluation and management methods that follow urban infrastructure.Insufficient research exists on targeted evaluation methods combining rural characteristics and development stage goals.Moreover,implementing targeted policies from the perspective of policy costs is difficult.The evaluation in prior works attached great importance to project performance,with inadequate attention toward the network and cluster effects the facilities,a comprehensive strategic frontier,as well as the investment value of the facilities’ systemic excavation.The existing literature also failed to form a rational unified evaluation value orientation.Specifically,a perspective on the entire life cycle of infrastructure evaluation is usually lacking.The evaluation method does not possess a scientific nature,typically adopts a subjective expert scoring system,and relies too much on the views of experts.The evaluation content is low,and no periodic evaluation or performance evaluation was implemented by a third party according to the life cycle and stage of the facility.Second,research on the combination of rural infrastructure and inclusive growth is relatively weak.As a theory of development economics,the way to realize inclusive growth has always been the focus of research.In the process of investment,construction and operation,rural infrastructure is closely related to economy,society,the environment,and farmers.Rural infrastructure construction is an important way of implementing inclusive growth in rural areas,but as a result of rural inclusive growth is still in its early stages,our country has not conducted a unified comprehensive evaluation of the effect of rural area infrastructure requirements and lacks a comprehensive evaluation system and the corresponding follow-up mechanism of resource allocation.Finally,the current research on infrastructure management focuses more on construction management and project management and less on operation management and lacks a systematic investigation of the entire life cycle.Accordingly,this study argues for the current implementation of the strategy of rejuvenating the country by strengthening the construction of rural infrastructure and promoting the development of inclusive rural infrastructure construction to form a set of systematic,comprehensive evaluation orientation and value standard.Therefore,on the basis of the full life cycle perspective of China’s rural infrastructure inclusive effect mechanism and evaluation as the study subject,the innovation of this work lies in applying the concept of“inclusive growth” in economics to the field of infrastructure management and proposing the definition and theoretical basis of infrastructure inclusiveness.Combining the concept of inclusive development with the implementation of infrastructure,this research expands the extension of inclusive growth,provides a people-oriented way to upgrade rural infrastructure,promotes the sustainable development of rural areas,and puts forward paths and policy suggestions for policies,such as a new countryside and the mitigation of poverty in rural areas while extending inclusive growth and providing a human-oriented ascension path choice of rural infrastructure to establish sustainable countryside development.Consequently,the gap between urban and rural areas shall be narrowed to achieve inclusive growth.This paper consists of nine chapters.Chapter 1 describes the background of this subject,presents the research questions,and defines the three core concepts herein.Chapter 2 is the literature review.Through this review,we shall present the methods and current situation of research problems,further build the research framework for this study,and establish the research ideas.The sources of literature mainly include domestic and foreign academic journals,conference papers,and master’s and doctoral theses.Chapter 3 introduces the research methods and presents the analysis and description of the basic information in the questionnaire survey method.Chapter 4 clarifies the core factor of inclusive growth at the macro level and the theoretical basis using the 2004–2017 statistical yearbook data of integrated rural characteristics to develop a rural inclusive development index measure,evaluate the inclusive growth in rural China and the qualitative and quantitative horizontal development trend of rural area infrastructure,and generate a macro-level study of the inclusive growth trends and the relationship between the quantity and quality of rural infrastructure investment.Chapter 5 provides a micro research in the field of rural infrastructure through a literature review and an exploratory case study for identifying five types of typical rural infrastructure in the entire life cycle of an inclusive influence factors.Moreover,through the case of five different types of rural infrastructure,this work adopts the method of grounded theory from exploratory cases not yet included in the literature and by ascertaining unexplored influence factors through the above two steps to establish 41 factors that affect the inclusive listing influencing factors of rural infrastructure.The questionnaire will be distributed to relevant experts in the field of listing and uses a five-point Likert scale for the ratings.The expert scoring results are collected as quantitative data and principal component factor analysis is applied for dimension reduction of the 41 factors,thereby creating a group of seven factors and subsequently building the grouping relationships between different factors.Chapter 6 employs structural equation modeling to build an inclusive theory model of rural infrastructure projects according to the grouping factors in line with the entire life cycle stages division in Chapter 5.By using structural equation modeling to build a path and theoretical model of the influencing factors and adjustment,this work generates 13 hypothesis and 9 paths to construct a rural infrastructure inclusive theory scheme at the micro level.Chapter 7 provides an evaluation system of rural infrastructure on the basis of the model to build the theoretical framework in Chapter 6.Using the existing index system of guidance in practice,including the development of technical and economic evaluation of environmental impact assessment,the system can objectively reflect the place such as by constructing a theoretical model of the measurement review and comparative literature about the weighting method to determine the index weight in the evaluation index system of inclusive rural infrastructure from the structure of the rural infrastructure evaluation model and the evaluation purpose and conducting a contrast research to ascertain the appropriate evaluation method.Finally,according to the results of the comparative study and the essential characteristics of each index and combined with the ultimate goal of the inclusive evaluation of rural infrastructure projects,the evaluation model combining ANP and ER theory is adopted to effectively deal with the subjectivity of index weighting and the problem of interdependence among indexes through ANP.Through the evaluation of the evidence reasoning theory method to deal with incomplete information and problems,this work combines the qualitative and quantitative indexes to construct an evaluation model of rural infrastructure.Chapter 8 verifies the validity of the model and the eligibility through the empirical case in Chapter 7 that tests the comprehensive evaluation model of rural infrastructure.Chapter 9 discusses the results of the above six parts,combines rural revitalization of the precision,analyzes to raise the level of path optimization in inclusive rural infrastructure.The innovation of this study lies in its application of the concept of inclusive growth in the field of infrastructure management and its proposal of the definition and theoretical basis of inclusive infrastructure.The concept of inclusive development combined with the implementation of infrastructure expands the extension of inclusive growth.As no systemic research about inclusive rural infrastructure exists,this work employs a questionnaire and optimal evaluation method to develop an evaluation index system of the entire life cycle of rural infrastructure for applying ANP and ER to evaluate system.