Economic Analysis On China's Regional Educational Gap

Tremendous achievements have been gained in the field of education in China since the reform and open-door policy, with people's level of education markedly raised. Meanwhile, there exists considerable educational gap among regions. Thus, in the context of promoting regional balanced economic and social development, it has become the focus of attention to numerous scholars as to how to deal with the educational gap among regions.Based upon the literature review both at home and abroad, this paper firstly selects a series of representative indicators from the three aspects, i.e., opportunities, process and the results of education, and then establishes a fairly complete indicator system. Thus a comprehensive and detailed analysis of each indicator is made by means of coefficient of variation (CV) and coefficient of pole difference (CP). By synthesizing all the indicators as well as applying principal componential analysis, this paper conducts a comprehensive quantitative evaluation of the level of education in all provinces, which indicates that there exists obvious educational gap among regions and that the region's level of education has a significant positive correlation with the economic development in the region.In view of the status quo of the educational gap among regions, this paper offers an explanation from the aspects of supply and demand. Empirical studies have shown that it is regional government's supply of the education and the difference in the educational need that mainly contribute to the regional education gap.From the perspective of supply side, the regional gap in governmental educational supply mainly springs from the difference in the economic base and the present institutional arrangements. China's fiscal decentralization system as well as the central government's assessment mechanism to local officials result in the lack of incentive mechanism for the local governments to increase the supply of the education, which accounts for the fact that economically underdeveloped areas lag far behind those economically developed areas in the supply of education.Finally, policy suggestions for bridging the gap in our regional education are put forward in this paper from the perspectives of demand and supply, including a reasonable division of the responsibility in education supply, balancing the regional financial regional resources, improvement in the official assessment mechanism, improvement in the factor market as well as in the educational credit market etc.