Analysis Of Path Dependency In The Institutional Change Of Administrative Official Consuming System In China

Administrative official consuming is the expenditure of government when a public servantperforms his administrative function and exercises a public function. With the continuous development ofthe socialist market economy and pluralistic values, the administrative official consuming has become theway for the public servants, also "people in economy" to hunt for their own interests. Meanwhile,administrative official consuming is vague, external, powerful, and imperfect. Besides, it lacks adequatesupervision and punishment on administrative official consuming. All of these stimulate the consumingdesire of public servants. Therefore, the standard of administrative official consuming has been upgraded atwill, and expenditure of administrative official consuming has been expanded, breeding large scalecorruption and bringing a large burden to the finance. In order to reduce the administrative cost, completelysolve the corruption problem of administrative official consuming and produce a good image ofgovernment, local government at various levels start the exploration of the institutional reform ofadministrative official consuming and have made great achievement. However, the reform isn’t sufficientand is even lost in a predicament.In this paper, based on the theoretical pivot of institutional changes and path dependency in newinstitutional economics, I make a thorough analysis on the issue of path dependency during the changingprocess of administrative official consuming. This paper first reviews and summarizes the historicalchanges of administrative official consuming in China, then it points out the mandatory, progressive andlagging features reflected in the changing process. Based on these and starting from the theory of pathdependency, this paper puts forward the feature of non-virtuous path dependency during the changing process. Then, it analyzes in depth the root of the path dependency from the four aspects of traditionalthought, vested interest groups, the inertia of initial path and institution and environment. It furtherproposes the idea of breaking the path dependency during the changing of administrative officialconsuming to achieve the benign development of the institutional reform of the administrative officialconsuming.