Accountability pressure, information asymmetry, and the spatial allocation of public goods in China

How does sustained top-down disciplinary pressure reshape the spatial distribution of public goods in a non-democratic state? This thesis argues that when officials must translate local implementation outcomes into performance evidence for higher-level evaluators, stronger top-down accountability can widen spatial inequality. Under information asymmetry, outputs that evaluators can see and verify carry greater political value, and they are most valuable where inspection and attribution are easiest. The empirical test uses China’s ‘Toilet Revolution’, a sanitation campaign that became a central government priority in 2018, as a common policy shock. I merge county-level public goods data, provincial anti-corruption investigation data, and geographical indicators into a county-year panel covering 2015 to 2022, and use a two-way fixed-effects model under a factorial difference-in-differences design to test whether pre-campaign disciplinary pressure shifted the post-2018 allocation of the targeted public goods between low-visibility and high-visibility counties within the same province. The results indicate that in provinces with stronger pre-campaign disciplinary pressure, the provision gap between low-visibility and high-visibility counties widened further after 2018. A one-standard-deviation increase in disciplinary pressure widened the disadvantage of low-visibility counties in per capita toilet provision by approximately 7% of the sample mean, with similar patterns for high-standard toilet counts, the sanitation index, and parks. These findings show how hierarchical accountability redirects visible public goods towards the places where performance is easiest to observe, and they offer an information-based political economy explanation for the uneven geography of public goods provision in non-democratic states.