COVID-19 has created long-lasting yet unprecedented challenges worldwide. In addition to scientific efforts, political efforts and public administration are also crucial to contain the disease. Therefore, understanding how multi-level governance systems respond to this public health crisis is vital to combat COVID-19. This study focuses on China and applies social network analysis to illustrate interactive governance between and within levels and functions of government, confirming and extending the existing Type I and Type II definition of multi-level governance theory. We characterize four interaction patterns—vertical, inter-functional, intra-functional, and hybrid—with the dominant pattern differing across governmental functions and evolving as the pandemic progressed. Empirical results reveal that financial departments of different levels of government interact through the vertical pattern. At the same time, intra-functional interaction also exists in provincial financial departments. The supervision departments typically adopt the inter-functional pattern at all levels. At the cross-level and cross-function aspects, the hybrid interaction pattern prevails in the medical function and plays a fair part in the security, welfare, and economic function. This study is one of the first to summarize the interaction patterns in a multi-level setting, providing practical implications for which pattern should be applied to which governmental levels/functions under what pandemic condition.
Taking the perspective of local party and government leadership change and using L-kurtosis to analyze provincial panel data in China from 1996 to 2018, this article identifies the structural change pattern of fiscal expenditures. We find that economic construction, science, education, culture, and health expenditures conform to the punctuated equilibrium pattern, while public security expenditures conform to the gradualism pattern. For expenditures under the punctuated equilibrium pattern, the longer the current local leader’s tenure is, the greater the friction with institutional inertia, and the larger the deviation from the average expenditure structure during the previous local leader’s tenure; however, for expenditures under the gradualism pattern, the local leader factor does not have a significant effect. This article also discusses the motivations of new local leaders for adjusting their expenditure structure. In terms of the proportion of economic development expenditures, in targeting expenditures, new leaders are more likely to “strive for the upper ends of the country,” while the expenditures for science, education, culture, and health are targeted to “converge to the national average.”
To eliminate poverty, government intervention is critical for addressing uncovered markets. To assess how this can be done effectively, this study constructs a two‐firm model with government intervention. The study focuses on the preconditions, methods, and effects of different government intervention strategies. There are three main findings. (1) When consumer income levels fall below a certain threshold, an uncovered market segment is created, and government intervention should be introduced. (2) Government intervention strategies can be divided into subsidy‐type, production‐type and mixed‐type, and each type achieves a different level of consumer surplus. Given a level of consumer surplus, the optimal strategy is affected by production costs. (3) For production‐type and mixed‐type intervention strategies, when the market is covered, lower intervention costs can achieve higher consumer surplus if government production costs are low. Furthermore, the optimal subsidy‐type intervention strategy varies with the changes in product quality if relaxing the precondition of market coverage.
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