Description
This PhD explores the marketisation reforms of the highway sector in China. Investment in transport infrastructure and high-quality service delivery have significantly contributed to regional development and economic prosperity. However, advanced economies have emphasised maintaining pre-existing transport systems and networks regarding sustainable development rather than building new infrastructure. This study devotes attention to China, where transport infrastructure investment is among the most enormous worldwide. Despite the widely publicised efficiency in transport infrastructure delivery and the perceived success of major infrastructure, scholars are concerned that China has severe cost overruns and benefit shortfalls in the investment associated with mismanagement and growing debt problems (Ansar et al., 2016; Liang et al., 2017). The maintenance of pre-existing transport systems and networks is even poorer with spending in crisis. Taking highways, the primary component in China's transport infrastructure investment (76% in the most recently completed five-year plan), for example, the maintenance funding gap for non-tolled ordinary highways, which account for 96.7% of total highway mileage, is projected to be more than CNY410 billion per year between 2021-2025, meaning that 51% of the country's ordinary highways will not be maintained. Data for 2021 show that while China has 1.49 times the highway mileage of the United States, investment in maintenance is only 20.9% of the latter, which is grossly inadequate (OECD, 2022).The Chinese Government's response has been marketisation reforms. The initiatives in highway maintenance management have been launched since 1995, aiming to streamline the highway institutions and personnel and introduce market mechanisms to run the provincial-led sub-national highway maintenance 'business'. Nearly three decades later, the results of applying a new public management (NPM) approach seem unfavourable, especially in the less developed regions. There is a research gap in in-depth policy and institutional analysis of this process which this thesis addresses. The PhD is studying a new type of reform in China and seeking to understand the extent to which Western market logic and the influence of new public management work in China. The PhD also examines two critical cases, both in comparatively less developed provinces, Jilin and Heilongjiang, which ranked at the bottom of recent national highway maintenance quality evaluations. Whilst they share some similarities, as well as geographic borders, their approaches to reform were quite different, with Jilin being the earliest adopter and Heilongjiang the latest.
The PhD seeks to answer the following research questions:
1.
How is the aim of the national initiative of marketisation understood by policymakers in under-developed provinces of China?
2.
How do the policymakers reflect their understanding in decision-making and in evaluating the implementation?
3.
To what extent have new public management principles been an important part of the reform practice in the case study areas?
4.
How do power dynamics influence policymaking during a transition?
5.
How do less developed provinces with different approaches to marketisation achieve similar policy outcomes?
It does so through mixed methods of documentary review and interviews with stakeholders by applying a refined analytical framework involving policy process, historical institutionalism, Fragmented Authoritarianism, power, and NPM concepts. The crucial findings are that the central state vision for markets is tough to fulfil in less developed provinces like Jilin and Heilongjiang, which do not have the conditions for market approaches to work. The sub-national priorities are about addressing the cost of work and the fact that less and less money is available each year for maintenance work. Various administrative and financial reforms that have undermined the power and dominance of the highway sector have also made effective maintenance management more difficult. Marketisation has been promoted and sometimes seen as a solution, but the timing and sequences of reforms depend on central directives rather than provincial motivations unless they are linked to the personal interests of policymakers. The blind pursuit of market creation as a political achievement rather than considering the conditions under which markets operate and adjust was a strong common theme of policymakers from top to bottom. The 'one-size-fits-all' approach usually used in China's reform implementation contributes to these problems. Also, the social perceptions and tendencies shared by the less developed provinces to embrace the public ownership system and resist the market logic constitute further impediments to transition in terms of collective action. Thus, even if the two case study provinces adopted different strategies and approaches in response to market transformation, similarities in institutional weakness drive highway maintenance management policy outcomes towards convergence.
The implications for the research field include filling the research gap in understanding China's governance of transport infrastructure in transition from the qualitative and comparative perspective; shedding light on the long-standing governance problems regarding marketisation in the under-explored less developed regions; offering a penetrating insight into China's sub-national policy process involving complex bureaucratic hierarchies and institutions; and providing relevant scholars and practitioners with access to the black box. The practical implications of the work include providing important empirical evidence on how to fund and manage the growing maintenance, management and upgrade costs in transport infrastructure management during a market transition in the given social-economic and institutional context; uncovering causal mechanisms and drivers of institutional change and persistence at the highway network; and developing insights transferable to understanding other systems under public sector dominance embedded in the less developed context. It would be important to understand the extent to which these findings are reflected in other sectors or in other Provinces where there is a different development trajectory. More generally, the findings offer opportunities to explore marketisation logic in infrastructure governance for rapidly growing economies.
| Period | Apr 2024 |
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| Examinee | Siyi Lin |
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| Degree of Recognition | International |