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This article documents the determinants of local government size corresponding with the work experience of political leader. Utilizing the city level data on the size of government and political officials in China, government size is found to be negatively associated with local political leaders' work experience in business. This relationship holds more firmly in poor cities or those with stronger fiscal decentralization. Moreover, we find evidence supporting that both fiscal decentralization and the size of public funded system contribute to the expansion of government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The centuries-old debate on big versus limited government continues to rage unabated worldwide. The findings of a few studies that have examined spending and employment relating to government size in China are mixed. Adopting a "subjective" perspective for evaluating the effect of government size, this paper shows that the likelihood of Chinese citizens being satisfied with three publicly provided services increases with more government expenditures but fewer government employees. Moreover, regardless of spending or employment measures, the relationship between citizen satisfaction and government size takes a quadratic form overall. Our findings accommodate both the welfare state and public choice views on the effect of government size on individual well-being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is China's public bureaucracy overstaffed? To answer this basic question objectively, one needs to define public employment in the contemporary Chinese context; survey data sources available to measure public employment; and finally, compare China's public employment size with that of other countries. Using a variety of new sources, this article performs all three tasks. It also goes further to clarify the variance between bianzhi (formally established posts) and actual staffing size, as well as other permutations of the bianzhi system, especially chaobian (exceeding the bianzhi). A key finding is that China's net public employment per capita is not as large as often perceived; quite the contrary, it is one-third below the international mean. However, it is clear that the actual number of employees in the party-state bureaucracy has grown - and is still growing - steadily since reforms, despite repeated downsizing campaigns. Such expansion has been heavily concentrated at the sub-provincial levels and among shiye danwei (extra-bureaucracies). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]