The Measurement of the Imbalance of Rural Long Tail Public Services

As mentioned above, the main reason for the imbalance of rural long tail public services is determined by both supply and demand. Especially from the perspective of the nature of the rural long tail public service itself, its discrete and fragmented characteristics, to a large extent, restrict the satisfaction of different providers for the rural long tail public demand. Therefore, this chapter starts with the degree of decentralization and fragmentation of rural long tail public services in different fields, and empirically measures the degree of imbalance. By measuring the imbalance of basic public services from the perspective of substitution of supply or demand, the underlying assumption is that demand can be uniformly satisfied through large-scale supply, while ignoring the special properties of fragmentation and atomization of heterogeneous demand. Relying on the property of rural long tail public services, this chapter calculates the supply–demand imbalance index from the degree of discretization in different fields. This chapter use the geographical distance of different types of rural long tail public services to measure the concentration degree of supply and demand. Specifically, the average distance between different types of public services and the central location (such as the urban geographic center) is calculated by Baidu Map to measure the concentration degree of public services. This measurement method can analyze the development process of diachronic geographic location, spatial scale and demand (supply) expansion or contraction from the perspective of spatial accumulation elements. The following is a detailed measurement from different fields which include rural special education, rural special health, rural special elderly care, rural special finance. Generally speaking, this chapter calculates the imbalance index of rural long tail public services in different areas of different prefecture level cities from the empirical perspective. It finds that there are great differences in the imbalance of long tail public services in different rural areas. It also synthesizes the imbalance indexes of various fields and sums them up to calculate the weighted average value, and constructs the comprehensive imbalance index of rural long tail public services.