Fig. 4

Government allocation of funding in sample provinces, 2018. Note: †Sichuan does not report information on when funding was received or disbursed. The province is thus omitted here. ‡In Fujian and Qinghai, central funding was combined with provincial funding and not separately reported. Per capita central funding in Table 3 was used to derive per capita provincial funding. §Per capita GDP data for Guangdong and Liaoning are for the whole provinces, not excluding Shenzhen and Dalian. For the third tranche of provincial funding in Heilongjiang, no additional funding was given, but final adjustments were made (i.e., deducting funding from some sub-provincial units to reward others). Data source: Fiscal data were collected from the provincial-level documents listed in Additional File 1 (i.e., doc-PROV-01 to doc-PROV-36). Data for the population in Shenzhen and Dalian were collected from http://data.stats.gov. Other population data and per capita GDP data were collected from [14]