村庄直选背景下的标尺竞争与农村公共品供给

本文探讨了中国农村的民主直选制度对农村公共品供给的影响及其作用机制。基于南京市第二次农业普查的全部村级数据，我们使用三种不同的指标度量农村公共品投资，在控制了地区虚拟变量、村庄规模、收入水平、村长特征等因素之后，研究发现竞选压力所形成的标尺竞争是影响公共品供给的主要机制，在缺乏对村长是否尽职的充分信息时，临近地区成为衡量本地村长绩效的标尺，因此相邻地区的公共品供给对本地的公共品供给有显著的正向作用。并且，我们还发现当控制了标尺竞争之后，村长的特征变得不再显著，这说明村长能力本身并不影响公共品供给，而是村庄直选使得选举出来的村长更加向村民负责。

Yardstick Competition and Public Goods Supply in Rural China under the background of Village Elections

This paper explored the effect and mechanism of Chinese rural democratic election on the public goods supply. Based on the data of second agriculture general survey in Nanjing, by three different indexes to measure the invest of rural public goods, and under controlling the district dummy, the scale of village, the level of income and the characteristics of village head etc, we have, in this paper, found that the yardstick competition based on the pressure of election is the main mechanism of democratic election affecting the supply of rural pubic goods. When lack of full information about the village head is duteous or not, the village which is adjacent will be the yardstick to judge the performance of this village’s head. So the supply of public goods in adjacent villages has a dramatic positive effect on the inspected village. And we also have found that after controlling the yardstick competition, the characteristics of village head is insignificant, which means that the capacity of village head does not affect the supply of public goods directly, while the elected village heads are more responsible for the villagers.