Join us for a free one-day workshop for educators at the Japanese American National Museum, hosted by the USC U.S.-China Institute and the National Consortium for Teaching about Asia. This workshop will include a guided tour of the beloved exhibition Common Ground: The Heart of Community, slated to close permanently in January 2025. Following the tour, learn strategies for engaging students in the primary source artifacts, images, and documents found in JANM’s vast collection and discover classroom-ready resources to support teaching and learning about the Japanese American experience.
The Performance and Driving Force of Government Health Expenditure in China: Evidence from Provincial Panel Data, 1991-2007
Qiulin Chen, Shorenstein-Spolgi Fellow of Stanford University will speak on the topic of China's Government Health Expenditure at Stanford University.
Where
The new health reform started in 2009 has shown the determination of the Chinese government, especially the central government, to increase its responsibility in the health sector. The most obvious manifestation of this commitment would be to increase government health expenditure (GHE). But there is still a hot debate about whether the government should allocate more public finds to health or just deepen the marketization of the health sector. Moreover, commitments at the central and local levels are not the same: local government responsibility for GHE is high, and commitments by the central government to increase GHE have not translated into increases in local government GHE as much as proposed in the national health reform.
Our research seeks to answer two questions: What was the actual pattern of GHE? And why did China’s local governments respond as they did? We first discuss the necessity of public financing for health care, and then analyze how intergovernmental economic competition affects local governments’ behavior under “Chinese-style decentralization” (known as fiscal decentralization with political centralization). Empirically, we apply a dynamic panel data model to provincial panel data from 1991 to 2007 to identify the effect of GHE on health performance in each province over time, using infant mortality and some morbidity metrics as health performance variables. We also examine differences across regions, as well as before and after the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) epidemic of 2003.
Our analysis provides evidence that Chinese-style decentralization negatively impacted GHE. The main findings are as follows: (1) increasing GHE did improve health performance, and this improvement was mainly driven by the GHE through the health department directly, not through spending by other governmental departments that also impact health. However, pursuit of economic performance lowered local governments’ GHE, mainly by decreasing GHE through local health departments. (2) Compared with in the eastern and western regions, this health improvement was not significant in China’s middle regions, where the intergovernmental economic competition leads to much less GHE through health departments. (3) The outburst of SARS in 2003 further increased the positive effect from GHE through local health departments, while the effect from GHE through other departments was not equally significant. All these results suggest that adjusting the structure of public health financing, reforming the fiscal system, and improving the performance evaluation system for local governments are critical for the success of China’s on-going health reform.
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Please join us for the Grad Mixer! Hosted by USC Annenberg Office of International Affairs, Enjoy food, drink and conversation with fellow students across USC Annenberg. Graduate students from any field are welcome to join, so it is a great opportunity to meet fellow students with IR/foreign policy-related research topics and interests.
RSVP link: https://forms.gle/1zer188RE9dCS6Ho6
Events
Hosted by USC Annenberg Office of International Affairs, enjoy food, drink and conversation with fellow international students.
Join us for an in-person conversation on Thursday, November 7th at 4pm with author David M. Lampton as he discusses his new book, Living U.S.-China Relations: From Cold War to Cold War. The book examines the history of U.S.-China relations across eight U.S. presidential administrations.