Research On Fiscal Expenditure Of The Vocational Education

Vocational education, a special subject which is closely related to the development of economy and social fairness. On the state conference of vocational education, President Xi of the People’s Republic of China pointed out that vocational education was a significant element of the education system and the important way for the youth to achieve success. He also emphasized that the government should focus sufficient attention on vocational education as it could help to cultivate workers with sophisticated skills, increase the employment rate and provide more opportunities to succeed for each person. Now our country is in the key period for development that makes it more demanding for profession. And the enterprises could get many young skilled workers through vocational education as well. Since the Eleventh Five-Year Plan, there have been almost 80 million graduates from all kinds of vocational schools and institutes making significant contribution to the economy. Besides, vocational education is an important way to promote the achievement of social fairness. Students receiving vocational education can also get better jobs and be paid by more. Therefore, the social and economic status of these people and their families will experience improvement.There is no doubt that funding is the key factor to the development of the vocational education. Whether the capital is rich or not determines whether the teaching resources (including the teachers and other related facilities) are rich or inferior. And the subsidies to the disadvantaged students will help achieve the goal of fairness. According to the public product theory, human capital theory, educational fair theory and stratified social theory, the government is the important beneficiary of the vocational education and because of this it should burden a large proportion of the educational costs. Liaoning Province is a relatively developed area in Eastern China where the traditional heavy industry is the pillar industry. This province is experiencing an important period of economic transition and industrial upgrading. The government of the province had made many policies and suggestions to encourage the development of the vocational education in response to the call of the central government. There are not much research, however, about the public expenditure on the vocational education in Liaoning Province. It will be of great appreciation if the results of this paper could be helpful to the improvement of the public expenditure and the development of the vocational education.The descriptive statistical method and the.comparative approach are used in this paper after reading related papers of other researchers and searching relevant data. The comparison of per-student vocational education expenditure between Liaoning and the max-expenditure province, the comparison of per-student expenditure between the vocational education and the general education, the distribution of the fiscal fund among different districts and schools and the structure of the source of the fund are all discussed in this paper, leading to five conclusion results. Firstly, the expenditure of the vocational education in Liaoning is insufficient. The gap between Liaoning Province and the province with most expenditure on per-student became wider as time went on. And the per-student vocational education expenditure to per capita GDP ratio of Liaoning was lower than the state average rate. Besides, the per-student vocational education expenditure to the per-student general education expenditure ratio was lower than the international standard. Secondly, the imbalanced distribution of teacher resource reflected fiscal expenditure was not allocated fairly in different districts. Thirdly, the same imbalance in different schools was another reflecting of the same problem as above. Fourthly, the structure of funding source was not reasonable. The proportion of financial support from the government and enterprises was not big enough, of which the payment from students was a little high. Fifthly, the responsibilities among governments have not been clear enough.For resolving these problems, there are five corresponding suggestions putting forward at the last section in this paper. Firstly, the province government should improve the standard of per-student vocational education expenditure and comply with it strictly. Secondly, balance the public expenditure on this kind of education in different districts reasonably. Thirdly, keep balance in schools of different levels and fiscally support some schools or institutes with potential and good social response. Fourthly, the government should keep increasing fiscal expenditure on the vocational education and make positive polices to encourage the industries institutes and companies to invest the vocational schools. Fifthly, governments should clear the duty of fiscal expenditure of each level through making elaborated polices. The innovation of this paper is that some theories and approaches concerning public educational expenditure are applied to research on the very issue of vocational education expenditure in Liaoning Province. However, some research results may be affected oppositely because of the difficulty of obtaining complete data.