文档介绍：China’s Public Services Privatization and Poverty Reduction: Health Care and Education Reform (Privatization) in China and the Impact on Poverty
(United Nations Development Programme Policy Brief)
Minqi Li Andong Zhu
Beijing, China, Summer 2004
I. INTRODUCTION
China has been prehensive, market-oriented economic reform since the early 1980s. China’s social structure and institutions have undergone widespread and far-reaching changes.
During the first three decades after the Chinese Revolution, despite low levels of economic development and limited amount of financial and technical resources, socialist planning was able to provide basic, but prehensive, social security and welfare to the majority of the population. Nearly all of the urban residents were provided with basic health care, education, housing, and pensions. As people’munes were consolidated in rural areas, by the end of the 1970s, the majority of the rural residents were covered by the cooperative health care system and provided with basic education.
The disintegration of people’munes led to the de facto privatization of China’s agricultural production. During the 1990s, the full-scale privatization of previously collective owned town and village enterprises further undermined the revenue base of rural local governments, many of which have e heavily indebted and lost the capability to finance and support local public services. In the urban sector, the state and collective owned enterprises have suffered from deteriorating conditions and many have been privatized.
These changes have undermined and eventually led to the disintegration of the once essful social security system built under socialist planning. While governments of different levels continue to own most of the hospitals, health care facilities, schools, and universities, the health care and education financing systems have been in effect, largely privatized. Further, in recent years many Chinese health care and education institutions hav