The Political Economy of Education Provision in China

In December 2010, high school students in Shanghai outscored their peers in countries all over the world on an international standardized test. At the same time, less than 40% of middle school students in rural China even attend high school because of the daunting test required for admission and high tuition fees. While the country's income gap can explain part of this large variation in the quality of education that children receive in rural China, some underdeveloped localities over-perform, while some well-off areas fail to adequately invest in educating the next generation. The goal of this project is to explain the political incentives that local governments face when deciding whether or not to make education a priority. I begin to develop a theoretical framework that explains why an authoritarian government would want to spend some of its limited resources on public goods like education in the first place, why it might have trouble motivating its agents to do so, and how the center can exert more control over its agents. I then propose some preliminary ideas for how I plan to conduct research, with the goal being to explain why local governments in China prefer putting more or less time and energy into providing schooling and why localities respond differently to central government initiatives that encourage investment in education.