Centralization and Decentralization of Public Goods Provision in China: The Relations with State Governance

Centralization and decentralization of public goods provision in China, which is tightly associated with state governance, has the following characteristics: Firstly, the principles that a public good should be provided by central government or local governments are not only determined by the intrinsic features of the public goods, but also by the relationship between state governance and public affair management. This relationship refers to whether the public goods providing can be separated from ruling the populace or controlling the bureaucrats. Secondly, the process of centralized or decentralized provision of public goods, in most of the circumstances, is divided to different chains according to its relationship with state governance, instead treated as a whole package, which leads to the combination of centralized and decentralized pattern of public goods provision. This paper argues that these characteristics result from the internal conflict between state governance and public affair management, and serve as a strategy employed by the central government to mitigate this conflict.