China's Rural Public Finance: The Village Perspective - Annex 7

This report provides a preliminary examination of changes in village fiscal affairs between 2000 and 2004. The basis for this assessment is a survey of 101 villages in 50 townships in 25 counties in 5 provinces in China that was carried out between March and April of 2005. The provinces include Jilin, Hebei, Shanxi, Sichuan and Jiangsu. In each province, the counties, townships and villages were selected to provide a representative cross-section. Our village survey was complemented by an investigation into fiscal changes in each of the 50 townships. In this report, we focus on the revenue and expenditure implications of these changes at the village level. We provide an overall assessment for all 100 villages, but also examine village-level differences across provinces, as well as differences between villages in the richest and poorest quintiles of our sample.