CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2021
| Author | Feng, Qian |
|---|---|
| Title | Health Privatisation in China: from the Perspective of Subnational Governments |
| Summary | From 2009, the Chinese government started to promote the policy She Hui Ban Yi/SHBY that encourages private investment in hospitals. This strategy of promoting private investment in hospitals represents the overall privatisation trend in Chinese health policymaking. Building on the national level health policymaking, the thesis focuses on the subnational governments in China and explains why are this national initiative has been implemented differently at the subnational level. Most existing studies in this topic focus either on the national level policymaking, discussing the relations between welfare policies and regime type or ideologies; or on the efficiency of public versus private hospitals in health sector by evaluating the outcomes. The thesis aims to understand SHBY and privatisation in health mainly from the local governments’ perspective, analysing how the fiscal survival pressure and political incentives affect the actual health policymaking in local governments in China. Drawing on official statistics, government policies and existing studies, the thesis mainly consider two types of influencing factors, and categorises three types of responses at the subnational levels. While the implementation of this policy requires a lot of resources and efforts, the thesis emphasises that, firstly, for the local governments, the fiscal impact, especially the hard budget constraint from the central government and soft budget constraint to the local public sector, plays the key role in health privatisation policies in China. Secondly, the political incentives, such as the the possibility of promotion by proving the governance performance might also motivate the local governments to promote this policy, however, the effects are not very clear. |
| Supervisor | Duman, Anil |
| Department | Political Science MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2021/feng_qian.pdf |
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