Performance Management On Primary Education Expenditures: The Experience From America And Choice For China

Our country is now transiting from a traditional planned economy to the socialist market-oriented one, and the financial system is also transiting from the original production-and-construction finance to the public finance. In the process of gradually establishing and making our public finance system perfect, how to strengthen the management of fiscal expenditures to make fiscal expenditures more efficiency is becoming very important. In order to make a more effective management of fiscal expenditure, it is necessary to overview the previous real fiscal performance, so that we can get the idea of reforming and optimizing our fiscal expenditure, thus performance evaluation is essential to the public expenditure management. This study focuses on the comparison of China's regional performance in primary education expenditure, and it is on the basis of the results of recent research. Through regional comparison, we hope to explore the influencing factors of public expenditure performance in the regional differences to provide feasible ideas and proposals for China's public expenditure management reform.This paper is divided into five chapters; each chapter is extracted as follows: The first chapter is introduction of this paper. It presents an overview of the research background, significance, research ideas in the study, as well as the main method used. This paper draws some results from both home and abroad research, and makes innovations in research content which focuses on the study of public-item expenditure and evaluation of the performance of its inter-regional cross-sectional comparison. At the same time, the paper also focuses on public expenditure item in the performance of the regional differences, finds reasons for this difference to greater depth; this is also different from other studies.Chapter II is merely a theoretical part. In this chapter the concept of performance management and performance evaluation are defined, and these two concepts are applied to public-expenditure management, public-expenditure-performance management and public-expenditure-performance evaluation is also defined. By defining of above concepts defined, the general principles of evaluation principles, evaluation methods are introduced, which are the theoretical base of public-expenditure-item performance comparison.The third part is of international experience; the main content is on the U.S. performance evaluation of primary education expenditure and performance evaluation. In this part a brief introduction of U.S. performance evaluation of public expenditure is made, and then U.S. performance evaluation on primary education expenditures and performance enhancing channels is focused. At last the paper introduces the Enlightenment on how to upgrade China's primary education expenditure performance.The fourth part is mainly on empirical analysis. We use the theory and method Chapter II introduced to make performance evaluation and regional comparison on primary education expenditure. For the availability of data, the paper has selected 2004 seven eastern coastal provinces and cities, by standardizing the data, the comparative rankings on general performance of primary education expenditures of these provinces and cities are obtained, and regional differences in the performance are analyzed, a strong empirical support on the conclusions thus is provided.The fifth part is the last part of this paper. It is actually conclusions and recommendations on the reform of primary education expenditures and performance management. Based on the introduction of performance evaluation of western countries, this article holds that the seven provinces and cities are in China's coastal areas; they are similar to each other in economic, social and cultural environment. Because the economic, efficiency and effectiveness of public expenditures of each region are different, different performance exists. In order to achieve the benefits of public spending, the government should think over the economy, efficiency and effectiveness of public expenditure and then make regional fiscal expenditure performance to a high level. This also shows that in the process of constructing a harmonious socialist society, integrated balance of economic and social development should become an important issue in China's fiscal expenditure management reform.