Regulating Early Childhood Education and Care Provision in the Socialist Economy of China

• In Event: Educational Research for Revealing Conflicts Derived From Different Ideologies in China

Abstract

The Chinese ECEC provision market has undergone a continual privatization process since the reform in the early 1990s and gradually evolved from having only public kindergartens to being comprised of public, private and transformed kindergartens today. However, the government’s policies that were designed for regulating only the public kindergartens remain largely unchanged and are not applicable in regulating the current market with the addition of private and transformed kindergartens. Two problems thus arise: unfairness in the distribution of public funding and inefficiency in using fiscal resources.
This paper aims to describe the underlying unfairness and inefficiency of government regulations of the Chinese ECEC provision by comparing firm behaviors of public, private and transformed kindergartens. Using the theoretical framework of regulating market failure, this paper approaches the research objective with the idea that different market failures require different regulation rules to correct them.
Mixed methodology is employed in the present study. Surveys of parents assess the kindergarten’s accessibility, affordability and quality of service. Interview with the director of each kindergarten are used to collect information about the nature of ownership, funding sources, education philosophy, evaluation and incentives system, types and quality of service offered, and innovations in pedagogical methods. Five kindergartens in Kunming, Yunnan province and four kindergartens in Yantai, Shandong province were selected. Nine kindergarten directors were interviewed and 900 parents participated in the survey.
The results point to an underlying unfairness in the way public funding is distributed. Since the government has focused on public kindergartens as the main channel of providing universal access to ECEC provision, it fully sponsors the public kindergartens while gives little fiscal support to others. Children from disadvantaged families receive service from private kindergartens which obtain no regular fiscal funding, indicating the targeting inefficiency. In addition, the results show there is inefficiency in the way that public kindergartens allocate their fiscal resources. As well, different ownership types prompted different firm behaviors in the partially regulated market for ECEC provision in China. For example, public kindergartens are able to operate on reduced number of school weeks annually because they are protected from pure market competition.
This research provides a Chinese case study describing some of the challenges that developing countries face in reforming their social service sector. The significance of this paper lies in its analysis of the problems resulting from institutional policies that are no longer capable of regulating a heterogeneous market economy using the firm behavior framework. In a way, the current transition state also provides a natural experimentation field for different institutional regulations under the context of China’s distinctive socialist market economy.

Authors

• Yi Heng Wang, University of Pennsylvania

• Li Liu, Beijing Normal University