In recent decades, the responsibility for the financing of compulsory education in rural China has rested with townships and villages which, with limited tax authority and uneven revenue capacity, increasingly relied on a plethora of arbitrarily imposed fees for funding. To reduce farmers‘...

Since the 1990s, China has pushed forward the province-managing-county (PMC) reform in some provinces as an experiment of fiscal decentralization. The reform provides a good opportunity to examine the impact of fiscal decentralization on fiscal behaviors of local governments in China. Using a...

Various education finance and taxation reforms in the past several decades have substantially changed China's system for funding basic education, but the present system is still characterized by insufficient funding and large inequalities across localities. Using data of more than 2000...