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Educational equity

(China Daily)
Updated: 2008-12-05 07:46

A strong sense of urgency inspired the Chinese government to substantially raise its budgetary allocations for education last year.

Such expanded government expenditure contributes a lot to improving the country's overall education quality and gives a needed boost to the economy's long-term competitiveness.

The government's continuous efforts to do so are surely laudable. Yet, it is also necessary for policymakers to pay closer attention to the huge educational gap between various regions if the country is to narrow its regional development gap any time soon.

A statistical communique recently issued on implementation of the country's educational expenditure shows that the central government increased its allocation for education by 76 percent year on year in 2007.

The central government has promised to increase such budgetary funds by 45 percent to 156.2 billion yuan ($22.6 billion) this year. This means Chinese students, on average, can expect better educational conditions than what they could have just a few years ago.

Five years of double-digit growth has enabled the national coffer to swell rapidly, providing the central government with unprecedented fiscal funds to spend on a number of key causes like education.

Such a surge in public spending on education has come as a tide that lifts all boats. Unfortunately, though, it left the gap between public expenditure per student in poor areas and that in developed regions even wider.

For instance, while pupils in Beijing received per capita public expenses worth 2,951 yuan ($428), their peers in Guizhou province in southwestern China got no more than 200 yuan ($29) last year.

The problem is not that public expenses for students in poor areas did not increase. In the case of Guizhou, they actually soared by 42 percent over the previous year. But that in Beijing rocketed by 82 percent.

Clearly, the different development level of local economies and hence the various fiscal strength of local governments, to a large extent, explain the regional gap in educational expenditure. And the latter, in turn, accounts for the widening development gap between coastal areas and poor hinterlands as well as between cities and rural areas.

The onus is upon the central government to help the less-developed areas to catch up with other parts of the country. To pump more central budgetary funds to support educational causes in poor areas will prove an effective way to help local economic growth.

No matter how the current economic situation may affect the fiscal position, policymakers cannot afford to stop providing much more education funds for poor areas.

(China Daily 12/05/2008 page8)