A 2020 fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) of China's 31 provinces found that administrative reform improves the business environment through three equifinal pathways (balance-developed, reform-oriented, resource-driven), with administrative-burden reduction as the underlying mechanism. Two unresolved issues follow from the study's design: whether these configurational pathways and the burden-reduction mechanism generalize to subprovincial administrative tiers (prefecture, city, county), where intra-provincial heterogeneity is large, and whether the fsQCA claims are robust to alternative calibration choices and to complementary causal designs. Later studies examine the burden-reduction mechanism at firm level with regression, instrumental-variable, and matching designs, but do not re-test the configurational pathways with subprovincial cases or under alternative calibrations. The open problem is to establish, with subprovincial-level configurational evidence and calibration-robustness analysis, whether and in what form the provincial plural-pathway result survives.

Background

Administrative burden is the standard concept in public administration for the costs people incur when interacting with government, conventionally decomposed into learning costs (finding out what a program requires), compliance costs (following the rules), and psychological costs (stress and stigma). Most of this literature studies citizen–state interactions in welfare programs; applying it to government–business interactions is a more recent extension. The World Bank's discontinued Doing Business indicators ranked economies by the procedural burden of firm regulation (permits, licenses, start-up procedures), and China's reforms since the 2010s — notably one-stop government service centers, where an entrepreneur completes all license-related items at a single counter, and later digital administration — are a leading instance of burden-reduction reform in a developing economy. Fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) is a set-theoretic, case-oriented method: each case (here, a province) is calibrated into fuzzy-set membership scores for several conditions and an outcome; Boolean minimization of the truth table then identifies which combinations of conditions are sufficient for the outcome. Because multiple distinct combinations can each be sufficient, the method captures equifinality — several roads to the same result — and reports fit through consistency (how nearly the cases in a configuration share the outcome) and coverage (how much of the outcome the configurations explain). Against this background, Liao Fuchong (2020) analyzed the full population of 31 provincial-level units with fsQCA, asking under what configurations of administrative reform (one-stop service coverage), digital governance capability, fiscal capacity, and geographic region a favorable business environment arises. The answer was plural rather than singular: three sufficient pathways — a balance-developed path (strong on all conditions), a reform-oriented path (one-stop service and digital governance compensating for weak finances in central/western regions), and a resource-driven path (fiscal slack and location carrying provinces with weak reform) — with reduction of administrative burden identified as the mechanism linking reform to outcome. The design of the study, however, leaves two limitations that define the present problem. First, provinces are a coarse unit: China's one-stop service centers and burden-reduction reforms are actually implemented by prefecture-level cities and counties, and provinces differ enormously internally, so the configurational patterns and the mechanism may not transfer downward. Second, fsQCA on the full 31-case population has recognized weaknesses — results can be sensitive to how calibration anchors are chosen, and set-theoretic sufficiency does not establish causal direction — so the causal claims warrant re-analysis under alternative calibrations and with complementary designs such as process tracing or quasi-experimental methods. These two issues jointly define the credibility of the 2020 finding: whether the plural-pathway, burden-reduction result is a durable feature of Chinese administrative reform or an artifact of provincial-scale analysis and particular calibration choices.

Problem Statement

Determine whether the configurational result of Liao (2020) — that administrative reform improves China's business environment along three equifinal provincial pathways (balance-developed, reform-oriented, resource-driven), with administrative-burden reduction as the underlying mechanism — generalizes below the provincial tier and survives the recognized methodological fragilities of its fsQCA design. Concretely: (1) using prefecture-level cities and/or county-level units as cases, test with configurational analysis (fsQCA or an equivalent set-theoretic design) whether the same or different combinations of one-stop service coverage, digital governance capability, fiscal capacity, and regional location are sufficient for a favorable business environment at those tiers, and whether the burden-reduction mechanism still operates there; and (2) assess the robustness of the provincial (and any subprovincial) solutions by re-running the analysis under principled alternative calibration anchors and consistency thresholds, and determine whether the causal direction of the reform-outcome link can be established. The overarching objective is a defensible verdict on the scale-dependence and design-sensitivity of the plural-pathway, burden-reduction account of China's administrative reform — whether it is a durable feature of reform across administrative tiers or an artifact of provincial-scale cases and particular calibration choices. Either prefecture-level cities or county-level units qualify as the case tier, provided a single tier is analyzed consistently. For each of the three original pathways, the question is whether an analogous sufficient configuration is recovered at the chosen tier, how the solutions shift under the alternative calibrations and thresholds, and whether the burden-reduction mechanism remains supported there.

References

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