Local governance and public goods provision in rural China

By Xiaobo Zhang, Shanhui Fan, Linxiu Zhang, Jikun Huang. 2004

265 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In developing countries, identifying the most effective community-level governance structure is a key issue and, increasingly, empirical evaluation of the effects of democratization on the provision of local public goods is needed. Since the early 1990s, tens of thousands of villages in rural China have held local-government elections, providing a good opportunity to investigate the effect of democratization on the level of public goods provision. Using a recent village survey conducted over a significant period of time, this paper compares governance by elected officials with that of appointed cadres and finds that elected officials tend to tax constituents less and provide them with higher levels of public service. Authors' Abstract.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Gender Studies, Political Science and International Relations

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/46dd31b4faeca6ccd7d8c536b1d85f6b64620874

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

1. Scott Rozelle
2. Jikun Huang
3. Bambang Suharnoko Sjahrir
4. Krisztina Kis‐Katos
5. J. Giles
6. Shuna Wang
7. Linxiu Zhang
8. R. Mu

In Gender Studies

1. J. Giles
2. Shuna Wang
3. Scott Rozelle
4. Yang Yao
5. Jikun Huang

In Political Science and International Relations

1. Scott Rozelle
2. Jikun Huang
3. J. Giles
4. R. Mu
5. Bambang Suharnoko Sjahrir
6. Krisztina Kis‐Katos
7. Yang Yao
8. Songqing Jin

Citations in the corpus

• Grassroots Democracy and Local Governance: Evidence from Rural China (2007, background): “While Zhang et al. (2004) is based on a sample in one advanced province (Jiangsu), our sample covers a much wider range of geographic, economic, and social variations.”
• Informal Institutions, Collective Action, and Public Investment in Rural China (2015, unknown): “This problem partly explains why scholars find that public goods were severely underprovided in rural China (e.g., Luo et al. 2007, 2010; Zhang et al. 2004).”
• Village Political Economy, Land Tenure Insecurity, and the Rural to Urban Migration Decision: Evidence from China (2014, background): “Consequently, the timing of village elections, in terms of election year, is fairly uniform within one county (Zhang et al. 2004), although the timing of elections varies within a province (Table 1) and even more so across regions (O’Brien and Li, 2000).20 Even though election years, specified by…”
• Elections, fiscal reform and public goods provision in rural China (2007, background): “Indeed, the study of Zhang et al. (2004) has found such an effect.”
• The Impact of Fiscal and Political Decentralization on Local Public Investments in Indonesia (2017, background): “…in Indonesia, top-down monitoring has had a larger impact on curbing corruption than local monitoring, which was subject to local elite capture (Olken 2007).3 In China, newly elected village heads in China tend to provide more public services relative to the appointed cadres (Zhang et al 2004).”