Abstract:

The salaries of faculties in the “double first-class” universities are funded by the government. During the 21st century, “basic expenditure plus project funding” is the principal means of allocating resources for “double first-class” universities, while faculties’ basic incentives are mainly constituted by the basic expenditure and their project-oriented incentives are mainly constituted by project funding in the form of contracts penetrated layers by layers. This article collected the panel data by selecting 2014—2018 fiscal expenditure data of 36 double first-class universities, combining SSCI research publications of those universities the year after one to three years, focusing on the short-term and long-term impacts of university incentives and their coordinating and interacting under the project system on the quantity and quality of faculty scientific research output. The results show that, in the short term, increasing the basic incentive has a significant partial effect on the quantity and quality of teachers’ SSCI output and a slightly positive synergy effect along with project-based incentive mechanism. However, increasing project incentive has a weak positive effect on the number of teachers’ SSCI research output, only relying on the synergy effect with basic incentive mechanism and a negative extrusion effect on the quality of teachers’ SSCI research output. However, from the perspective of med-and-long term development, the positive effect of increasing basic incentives on teachers’ scientific research output is difficult to maintain, and there is a significant negative crowding effect; Increasing project incentive also has a weak effect on teachers’ scientific research output, and has a negative extrusion effect on the quality of their scientific research output.

Key words: project system, fiscal expenditure, incentive mechanism, scientific research output