Abstract
The COVID-19 epidemic has crashed on the social and economic stability of China and even the world, and raised the question: how has the Chinese government done with public health in recent years? The purpose of this paper is to clarify the definition and items of Chinese public-health expenditure, then to objectively evaluate the Chinese government's performance, so as to help the government to perform better in public health. To achieve this goal, we measure the Chinese public-health expenditure at national and provincial levels based on our definition, and then compare it with the expenditures of other countries. The results show that: (1) the level of public-health expenditure in China is relatively low and far lower than that in developed countries; (2) Chinese governments have not paid enough attention to the prevention and control of major public-health emergencies, which may be an important reason for the outbreak of COVID-19; (3) Chinese public-health expenditure shows a fluctuating growth trend, but the growth rate is so slow that it is lower than that of GDP and fiscal expenditure; (4) although the Chinese government inclines the public-health expenditure to the poor provinces in central and western regions, the imbalance and inequity of public-health resource allocation are still expanding among provinces; (5) there is a lot of waste of resources in the public-health system, which seriously reduces the efficiency of public-health expenditure in China. Therefore, the Chinese government should improve the quantity and quality of public-health expenditure in the above aspects.