Public Goods Provision and Rural Governance in China: an Empirical Analysis Using the 2002 CASS CHIP Survey

Using a large village survey conducted in 2002, this paper examines the relationship between local governance and public goods provision in rural China focusing on village- and county-levels. The main points of this paper are as follows. First, regarding to rural governance at the village level, we have found that promoting 'grassroots democracy' is important to make village administration more public service-oriented. Second, as for the governance at the county level, although detailed information on the characteristics of county governance are not available at present, our examination using county's fiscal statistics suggests that increase in intergovernmental fiscal transfer to county budget does not necessary produce improvement in rural public goods provision by the county government and that the retrenchment of public servants tends to affect public servants working in rural area such as teachers and medical workers than the administrative officials. Thus the characteristics of governance at the county level matters because it actually determines the delivery of public goods.