Natural resources, rent dependence, and public goods provision in China: evidence from Shanxi’s county-level governments

The Journal of Chinese Sociology

Table 3 Descriptive summary of variables (2007)

Variables	Mean	Std. dev.	Min	Max
Independent variables
Coal Dependence Index (%)	20.33	27.02	0	123.954
GDP per capita (yuan)	13061.03	8639.64	2357	49,566
Ratio of urbanization (%)	30.70	10.02	12.240	70.640
Total population (person)	257380.40	132707.30	62,201	740,341
Land area (km²)	1471.09	589.32	221	3166
County-level city (dummy variable)			0	1
Transfer dependency (%)	61.946	23.403	0	96.542
Number of students in primary and middle school (per 10,000 persons)	1732.632	280.900	1212.391	2766.479
Number of beds in healthcare institutions (per 10,000 persons)	24.909	10.249	6.363	56.789
Dependent variables
Share of social expenditures (%)	51.062	7.018	30.033	63.490
Share of education expenditures (%)	23.999	4.919	13.850	37.608
Share of social security and healthcare expenditures (%)	19.533	4.986	8.909	31.523
Share of environmental protection expenditures (%)	5.337	3.222	0.987	15.652
Share of administrative expenditures (%)	21.039	7.171	12.489	47.244

Notes: (1) N = 96. When calculating the shares of various expenditures in total expenditures, both budgetary and extrabudgetary expenditures were included. The share of own revenues in expenditures in the Hejin county-level city of Yuncheng is 117 %, and we take it as 100 %. Its transfer dependency (the ratio of transfers to total expenditures) is then 0 %. Therefore, we took the log of transfer dependency as log (x + 1). Similarly, when taking the log of the Coal Dependence Index, we used the same method
(2) Data source: Ministry of Finance, 2011; National Bureau of Statistics, 2008a, c; Shanxi Statistical Bureau, 2008