Principal-agent View About Failure Of Local Government Public Crisis Warning

After 30 years of reforming and opening up, China's economic and social development has made great achievements, but in the minetime, we are in a comprehensive and profound social transition. As social competition and population movement speeding, uneven distribution of wealth, increased social pressures and conflicts, increasing participation in democracy, the public crisis faced by the Government will become more diverse in the form, and more and more high in the frequency. China has entered the period of frequent public crisis hapening. If the crisis management is treated as a "defensive war", the crisis early warning is the first line of defense in the crisis management. And it's also the largest line of defense for the lowest cost and largest profit.Government is the holders of public power. Public crisis warning is the public goods and services that the government must provide.It is also the demand of building a service-oriented government, improving the comprehensive competitiveness of society and building a socialist harmonious society. However, from the 2003 SARS epidemic, to the 2008 event Weng'an, Guizhou, Shanxi dam-break event, in these series of crisis, the crisis early warning capabilities played by the local government are in the different degrees of failure. Some of the crisis could have been effectively avoided. However, as the local negative warning, it is causing the crisis, causing enormous losses, and greatly increasing the cost of public crisis management.Combination of principal-agent theory, we know that the local government has the dual role for dealing with the public affairs of the central government and the local government. Because of the failure of the central government and local public supervision and constraints in the local government; the unscientific system of the local government performance evaluation; the wrong place of local government's functions; combined with weak administrative accountability system, local governments'low cost for punishment, negative selection into early warning has become the rational strategic choice for the local governments. The failure of the crisis early warning led to the crisis, and the crisis brought the disaster to the public life and property.Local governments should not spend a huge cost in dealing with crisis, but focus forward the crisis management and attach great importance to public crisis warning. In order to control the failure of local government public crisis early warning, Local governments should establish an effective incentive mechanism for the encouragement and competition an effective restraint mechanism, such as early warning mechanisms of accountability of public crisis, the crisis of public authority legally binding mechanisms and the strengthening of monitoring mechanisms, should be established. And we should improve the public crisis of early warning mechanisms, and the public sector crisis warning. we also should improve decision-making in crisis early warning mechanism and standardize the information disclosure mechanism. We should strengthen the construction of crisis early warning e-government and improve the sestem of crisis early warning security and crisis warning. we should improve public participation, and strengthen public education, training about crisis. we should also actively play the role of expert advisory bodies and encourage non-governmental organizations in the crisis early warning.