Inter-provincial inequality of public health services in China: the perspective of local officials’ behavior

Background After economic reform, China experienced rising public health services inequality between the eastern developed and mid-west undeveloped provinces. The fiscal transfer payment system which aims to shape the disparities was considered inefficient. However, there are only a few studies that address the political reason when analyzing the inter-provincial public health services inequality. And the previous studies did not consider a possible non-linear relationship between the fiscal transfer payments and the inter-provincial public health services equalization.