Empirical Study On Improving The Budgetary Supervision Capacity Of The Grassroots People’s Congress

Since the opening of 18 th National Congress, the CPC Central Committee has been promoting the establishment of a modern financial system of top-level design concept and laying more emphasis on modernization of budgetary management. Obviously, budget supervision is an important part of the modern budget management. And the legislature has become the external supervision institution governing government revenue and expenditure. So it is imperative to strengthen the capacity of budget supervision of the legislature. The people’s Congress, as a legislative body, was empowered with the right of budget review by constitutional law and other related laws. However, local People’s Congress and its standing committee still have problems in the process of budget supervision in practice. Today, academicians focus on power shortage and mechanism defect. However, this paper argues that only the People’s congress equipped with both the right of budget supervision and the ability to exercise its power, can the supervision become effective. This paper aims to change the perspective of study from static dimension on supervision power and mechanism to dynamic dimension on the capacity of budget supervision of the people’s Congress and its Standing Committee. We also attempt to improve the budget oversight capabilities of People’s Congress to ensure the effectiveness of budget supervision and implement the central top-level design concept technically under such kind of inflexible system.With the development of urbanization, the government’s financial revenue and expenditure is more active. What’s more, the emergence of new problems and the deletion of current budgetary management system also increase the difficulty of the budget management of local governments, which means that local People’s Congress should be more professional. In reality, on the legal level, the Constitution, Budget Law and other laws regulate the budget supervision power of local People’s Congress macroscopically and lack of related details. On the other hand, the majority of academicians mainly focus on budget supervision capacity of the NPC and Provincial People’s Congress and overlook the grassroots People’s Congress, to some degree. In other words, the contradiction that the role of budget supervision stands out but the situation of budget supervision is insufficient is becoming increasingly acute. Therefore, it is imperative to highlight the development of budget supervision of local People’s Congress. Many local People’s Congress such as Wenling, Zhejiang, Huinan Town, Pudong Shanghai, Yinzhou, Ningbo,Zhejiang District have promoted the reform of budget supervision, achieved remarkable achievements and even formed budget supervision model. they set great examples for other local People’s Congress.For that reason, the main body of this paper contains three parts. Firstly, review the related literatures both at home and abroad. Secondly, we take People’s Congress of Wenling as a case which is in the forefront of the budgetary management reform, and try to study the capabilities of its budget supervision in a quantitative research way instead of qualitative ways. We aim to improve the supervision capabilities microcosmically under the current system. Finally, put forward some suggestions for other local People’s Congress based on successful experience in Wenling.Quantitative research shows that the capacity of budgetary supervision of Wenling People’s Congress has received highly appreciation from respondents. Secondly, the evaluation of respondents are influenced by the following six factors: the quality of budgetary supervision subject, organization structure of budget supervision, the ability to guide and organize public to participate in budgetary supervision, the detailing of budget and final accounts, budgetary supervision timing and political support. Thirdly, the result regression equation shows that the contribution of various factors are different. Thus, Wenling People’s Congerss has made achievements in improving the capacity of budget supervision and some of its measures have obtained praise from respondents. This paper summarizes the successful reform of Wenling based on the quantitative research conclusion and interview data. On the basis of results, we aim to make some feasible and scientific suggestions on capacity building of budgetary supervision for People’s Congress.It should be pointed out that this research is based on the National Social Science Fund Project called Research on Innovating Local Budget Supervision Mechanism(Project Number is 11CGL027). In addition, this paper is inspired by the subject and content of this project and its academic achievement. It is significant in both theory and practice.