农村基层治理、专业协会与农户增收

Rural Grassroots Governance, Specialized Cooperative Organizations and Farmers’ Income Growth

20世纪80年代以来,中国农村逐步形成以基层党组织为核心、村委会为主体、农村专业协会等社会组织为有机组成的多元化基层治理体系。本文首先构建简单的理论模型,剖析农村专业协会及其制度安排对农户收入的影响,提出理论命题,进而利用2126个村庄的调查数据和倾向得分匹配双差分法进行实证检验。研究表明,专业协会总体上没有在促进农户增收方面发挥显著的积极作用。制度安排对专业协会的增收效应具有重要影响:引入盈余返还分红机制和加强组织民主建设可较好地改善专业协会的增收效应,立足本村需求建立的专业协会较跨村协会更有利于农户增收。外部制度环境亦具有重要影响--由村委会作为发起人有利于发挥多元基层治理机制的互补作用,提升专业协会的增收效应,所在村庄与上级政府的关联较紧密则倾向于削弱专业协会的增收效应。

Improving the grassroots governance system has long been an important topic for academics and practitioners.As an intermediate layer between governments and individuals,social organizations take the advantage of their ability to mobilize individuals,integrate social resources,accumulate social capital,achieve self-governance and are seen as capable of fully responding to the multifaceted claims of individuals and protecting the rights of their members.As such,social organizations can be seen as remedies for market and government failures.They are also believed to be a driver of the improvement of local public services and the national governance system.However,social organizations have disadvantages.Social organizations may face internal failures: low efficiency due to the lack of internal incentives and elite capture due to the insufficient supervision mechanism.In addition,the effectiveness of social organizations is determined by a set of external factors,among which government policy support and (national and/or local) regulations and interventions are widely discussed. Since the 1980s,a diversified grassroots governance system has gradually emerged in rural areas in China,with local Party organizations at the core,village committees as the main body,and social organizations (represented by specialized cooperative organizations) as important components.However,as progress in local governance has started late in China,grassroots social organizations in general face serious problems in terms of insufficient internal governance and dependence on external support.Therefore,the aforementioned duality of social organizations should be particularly important in China.Despite this,compared with foreign studies on this topic,China's domestic studies on social organizations are mainly rational analyses,with most emphasizing the effects of the macro-institutional environment shaped by governments on social organizations.Moreover,given the lack of informative micro-level data,most empirical studies are case studies.Altogether,the current literature is unable to determine the effects of internal institutional arrangements and the external institutional environment on the effectiveness of China's grassroots social organizations. To fill this gap,this paper focuses on specialized cooperative organizations as representatives of social organizations.In doing so,we detect the effects of internal institutional arrangements and the external institutional environment on the effectiveness of social organizations and provide additional information to the literature.Specifically,we first build a simple theoretical model for examining the effects of specialized cooperative organizations and their institutional arrangements on the income of rural residents.Based on a survey dataset of 2,126 villages for the 1997-2002 period,we apply the PSM-DID approach to conduct an empirical analysis.We find that the participation of specialized cooperative organizations has no significant effect on improving the local economy and villagers' income,but that internal and external institutional arrangements affect their effectiveness:(i) introducing a dividend mechanism and reinforcing grassroots democracy enhance the effectiveness of rural professional associations;(ii) compared with cross-village organizations,specialized cooperative organizations in a single village are more likely to improve the income of their members because of their ability to respond to local needs;(iii) members generally benefit more from their participation when specialized cooperative organizations are sponsored by village committees;and (iv) members residing in villages more politically connected to upper level governments are less inclined to increase their income. These findings provide new insights into the role of internal and external institutional arrangements in improving the grassroots governance system.Based on the suggestions presented in this paper,we provide important insight into how to achieve the active effects by social organizations and promote rural grassroots governance and rural revitalization both now and in the future.