Provision of Public Goods and Services
Elise Pizzi and Hu Yue. 2022. "How Does Government Policy Shape Migration Decisions? The Case of China's Hukou System." Modern China.
In the last 30 years, migration and urbanization have transformed China. Chinese cities use the household registration (‘hukou’) to adjust the barriers to gaining local status and access to public service benefits in an effort to shape migration patterns. To what extent do hukou policies shape decisions about migration destinations? We draw on a nationally representative survey of migrants and an original survey experiment to test the effect of hukou barriers and benefits on the relative appeal of different destination cities. We find that strict limits on local hukou status do not deter labor migrants. However, local hukou status is important for migrants because of the public benefits it confers. When migrants can gain access to public services without changing their hukou status, cities boost their appeal. These findings demonstrate that hukou policy has real impact on migration patterns and on access to public benefits for millions of Chinese.
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Badashvili, Madea, Anastasiya Byelousova, Parth Gupta, Amy H. Liu, Elise Pizzi, Michael Sanchez, Lela Shenglia, Mariana Unapokoshvili, Lyndsey Wang, and Katherines Wierschke. 2022.“A Spatial-Based Explanation for Institutional Trust in Georgia: Evidence from the Maternal Healthcare System.” Journal of Eurasian Studies.
When an institution is not easily accessible—for example, it is geographically far—it can be hard for institutional trust to develop. The institution is not only unavailable, but it can also be seen as inappropriate, non-affordable, unapproachable, and unacceptable. In this paper, we examine whether reducing distance to medical facilities and professionals can improve trust in the maternal healthcare system. We do so by focusing on developments in Georgia. Since 2013, the government has aggressively closed the distance to service access not by building more facilities or hiring more staff per se, but by upgrading and funding existing facilities and professionals in a national network to better coordinate service provisions at the local levels. Employing an original survey, we match GPS coordinates to measure distance and use regression analysis to demonstrate how ensuring every woman has access to maternal healthcare at the right place at the right time has improved institutional trust in the system. The implications highlight results that are generalizable beyond both the country and maternal healthcare.
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Pizzi, Elise. 2020. "Ethnicity and Government Provision of Drinking Water Infrastructure in Rural China." Asian Survey.
What areas does the Chinese government prioritize for building new drinking water provision infrastructure? Chinese policy favors ethnic minorities and minority autonomous regions due to concerns about inequality and potential instability. However, the implementation of policy does not always reflect the pro-minority government policies. Drawing on a new dataset of more than 10,000 drinking water projects in rural Guizhou Province, I explore how ethnicity and autonomy influence the implementation of public goods provision policy in an authoritarian context. I argue that drinking water facilities are more likely to be built in majority Han areas because implementation and project completion is easier for officials. This study finds that the Chinese government provides drinking water infrastructure at a higher rate to areas where the minority population is smaller. This result indicates that implementation concerns trump policy design when it comes to drinking water infrastructure. The findings have implications for ethnic politics and public goods provision and for the implementation of policy in non-democratic contexts. In addition, these findings demonstrate why regions with larger minority populations are often slower to develop and improve access to basic public services.
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Jami Nunez and Elise Pizzi. 2018. “Governance and Water Progress for the Rural Poor.” Global Governance. [online]
Why do some countries see improvements in access to water for the rural poor while others do not? Even for countries that met the Millennium Development Goals of halving those without water access, the progress accrued largely in urban areas and to the rich. We explore the role that various aspects of governance quality play in extending drinking water access to rural areas, particularly to the very poorest. We draw on a dataset complied from data on governance quality and newly available data on access to water by wealth quintiles to explore change in drinking water access across countries. We find that rural governance quality is far more important for extending water access to the rural poor than it is for the rich. In particular, countries with greater capacity to design and implement policy improve water access rates for the poor more quickly than those with weaker governance, but democracy and voice and accountability do not affect water access for the rural poor or the rich. Our work extends the research on water progress to consider the factors that drive inequities between the rich and the poor and ties into the larger research agenda on the distributive effects of governance in development outcomes.
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Pizzi, Elise. 2018. “Does Labor Migration Improve Access to Public Goods in Source Communities? Evidence from Rural China.” Journal of Chinese Political Science. [online]
What is the effect of out-migration on drinking water provision in rural China? Despite concerns about the ability of migrants to contribute to collective action for public goods provision, this study demonstrates that villages with higher rates of labor migration are more likely to have public drinking water than those with little migration. Temporary labor migration reduces isolation and increases the connections outside the village. Funding organizations favor villages where they have contacts as well as villages that they perceive as in need of support because most working-age adults are working outside the village. As a result, villages with high rates of out-migration are more likely have public access to drinking water. The findings are based on data from a survey of more than 50 natural villages in two townships of Southwest China.
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