Economic Catching-up, Public Expenditure Bias and Urban-rural Public Services Gap

Through constructing a theoretical model for interpreting the impact of government expenditure bias on the gap between urban and rural public services, it is aimed to explore the transmission path and influence mechanism of public expenditure decision-making on the unbalanced development of urban and rural public services under the background of economic catch-up, reconstruct and measure the equalization index of urban and rural public services based on the two dimensions of productive public services and consumptive public services, to make empirical test under the research hypothesis with the provincial panel data from 2000 to 2017. The results show that, the gap between urban and rural public services is gradually expanding, and the gap of consumer public services between urban and rural areas is larger than that of productive public services; the economic catch-up behavior of backward provinces makes local governments prefer productive expenditure, while increasing productive government expenditure will lead to the expansion of urban-rural public service gap. Therefore, the government should change the evaluation mechanism, improve the financial management system below the provincial level, reasonably divide the powers and expenditure responsibilities between the central and local governments, innovate the supply mechanism of rural public goods, and build an effective path to realize the balanced development of urban and rural public services.