Design, measurement, and characteristic analysis of uncertainty indices for education fiscal policies: a case study of China

Since the release of “4%” objective of fiscal educational expenditure to GDP in 2012, the Chinese governments at all levels have frequently formulated or changed education finance policy in light of the complex situation of China’s economic development. The policy changes have ensured the steady growth of education financial investment, but also brought a series of unknown or uncertain factors to the allocation of educational resources. According to the text context from the selected mainstream Chinese media in the past two decades, this study creates a newspaper-based policy uncertainty indices of China’s education fiscal policy under the framework of Baker (JAMA 131(4):1593–1636, 2016)'s study. We also apply the EGARCH model to test the robustness of the results. Our findings reveal that the uncertainty indices are highly consistent with the fluctuation of education fiscal policy in various stages in China. It suggests that the government sectors should define the reasonable boundaries of the "tangible hand" and harden the budget in the process of allocating education resources, to eliminate the negative impact brought by the uncertainty of education fiscal policy. Moreover, this study puts forward the research prospect of the application of policy uncertainty in the field of education.