Does Super-Department Reform Improve Public Service Performance in China?

Abstract

Echoing the global public management reform movement, China’s authorities advocated ‘super-department’ reform (SDR) to curb interdepartmental conflict and administrative inefficiency. However, the related performance consequences have not been empirically investigated. We test the reform’s effects on citizen satisfaction with public services through a natural experiment involving twenty-five counties in Guangdong province (2009–2012) and the difference-in-differences method. The results show that the reform has improved public service performance, but its effects are marginal and unsustainable. We discuss the theoretical contributions and policy implications of the findings and identify future research avenues.

Key words:

• Super-department reform
• public management reform
• public service performance
• natural experiment
• China

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work was supported by Lien Foundation and National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant numbers 71473190 and 71403203].

A previous version of this paper was presented at the 3rd Annual Conference of the Asian Group for Public Administration (AGPA), ‘Local and Regional Cooperation and Public Governance’, in Singapore on 26–28 September 2013. I would like to thank the conference participants for their helpful comments and suggestions. The informative comments from the anonymous reviewers also helped a great deal. I am grateful to Huping Shang, Ruoxian Sun and Fanghui Zheng for the data collection work. Any remaining errors are my own.

Notes

1 For instance, a new Bureau of Urban Construction and Water Affairs was recommended to replace three former agencies (the Bureau of Urban Construction, Bureau of Water Supply and Bureau of Urban Management) to enforce laws related to urban construction, real estate administration, public utilities, the water supply and urban management. Former bureaus such as the Bureau of Work Safety, Supervision Bureau and Bureau of Culture and Tourism Administration were advised to form a new Bureau of Market and Safety Inspection in charge of market regulation and law enforcement.

2 County-level cities were instructed to merge their organizations to include less than thirty agencies. Large, medium and small counties had to keep fewer than twenty-eight, twenty-four and twenty agencies, respectively. Districts and districts created out of county-level cities could maintain twenty-two and twenty-eight agencies at most, respectively.

3 We thank one anonymous reviewer for suggesting us to discuss SDR’s decentralization effects.

4 The number of observations should be 480 (120 × 4), but the data on PSP of twelve counties in 2012 are missed. We impute the missing data by using the aggregated prefecture-level values minus the mean values of other counties in the same prefecture-level city weighted by their sample sizes. The model estimates of the imputed data set are substantially similar with that of the original data set (N = 468), and we report the results of the original data set.

5 The samples included 100 respondents for populations under 300,000; 150 for populations of 300,000–500,000; 200 for populations of 500,000–800,000; 250 for populations of 800,000–1 million; 300 for populations of 1–1.5 million; 400 for populations of 1.5–2 million; and 500 for populations higher than 3 million.

6 About 10 per cent of the respondents living in remote regions were randomly sampled and interviewed by telephone. The test showed no significant differences between the responses collected in person versus on the telephone (Zheng 2013).

7 The simple correlation coefficients are all larger than 0.70.

8 We thank one anonymous reviewer for suggesting us to do so.

9 The Breusch–Pagan test of independence (χ²=4143.985, p<0.01) suggests that SUR is appropriate to estimate the models. We use the STATA command XTSUR to estimate the models in unbalanced panel data with random effect. The results are excluded to save space, but are available from the author upon request.

10 Wang left Guangdong in December 2012 and was promoted to be Deputy Prime Minister of China in 2013.