The Motivation of Building Service-Oriented Government from the Perspective of Chinese Local Government

To build a service-oriented government has been one of the most important goals of chinese political restructuring. But researches show that local governments still place greater emphasis on economic development than public service. This article focuses on the mechanism of motivating local government to transfer to service-oriented government. On the bases of literature review this paper explores the incentive of chinese local government on economic development and public service, points out the obstacles of building service-oriented government. Then this article analyzes the dilemma of central government - the desirability of providing incentives for any one activity decreases with the difficulty of measuring performance in any other activities that make competing demands on the agentpsilas efforts. Furthermore this article employs principal-agent model to analyze possible mechanisms to motivate local governments to focus on public service. The conclusion is that to introduce competition mechanism in the domain of public service, to promote public opinion supervision and attract members with high levels of public service motivations to join government will be more effective and efficient on building service-oriented government.