The Social Capital in Rural Areas and the Efficiency of Rural Public Services and Peasant Self-supply: From the Perspective of Collective Action

Nowadays, the low efficiency of the peasant collective action delays the pace of the new countryside construction of China. There is plenty of research which discusses the reasons causing this phenomenon and how to enhance the peasant collective action efficiency in academic circles. However, Cost-Benefit Analysis has been ignored more or less in the existing research on peasant collective action efficiency. As a result, it is hard to find a practical path of improving peasant collective action efficiency. According to the Cost-Benefit Analysis, currently the high cost of peasant collective action is the root of its low efficiency. Decreasing peasant collective action costs and improving its efficiency must rely on social capital accumulation in rural areas. According to the stages of peasant collective action, peasant collective action costs can be subdivided into mobilization costs in the mobilization stage, direct resource costs and incentive costs in the operation stage, and supervision costs in the maint