Catastrophic costs among drug-susceptible tuberculosis households in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, China: determinants and economic impact evaluation.

Government performance evaluation is a certain assessment of the performance and effectiveness of the government in fulfilling its functions, and its results can influence the process of government system reform in various ways around the world (). With the implementation of China’s reform and opening up, the country’s economic system has shifted from a highly centralized planned economy to a gradually open socialist market economy. China’s society has ended its era of egalitarianism due to poverty and is now confronted with social equity issues such as the widening gap between the rich and the poor, the urban–rural dual structure, and the governance capacity of government officials. The functions and roles of the Chinese government have undergone profound changes. The new public management movement that has emerged in Western countries has led to the widespread adoption of government performance evaluation reform measures based on the concepts of public responsibility and customer first by Western governments. The new public management theory holds that the government is a people-oriented service provider rather than a traditional authoritative bureaucratic institution that issues orders. The new public management shows a trend of goal (performance) orientation, with the government’s administrative services centered on “customer” satisfaction. Therefore, the top priority of the government is to provide fair public services (). These concepts have been introduced to China and have become research hotspots, providing references for Chinese governments at all levels to promote social equity and improve governance capacity. Under the influence of the new public management movement, the government performance evaluation system attempts to build a more scientific, reasonable, open and transparent evaluation framework oriented toward the interests of the people, aiming to encourage government agencies to continuously improve their own efficiency and better serve the public. With the advancement of China’s service-oriented government construction, governments at all levels have taken the satisfaction of the people as the fundamental criterion for evaluating government work. The model of citizen participation in government performance evaluation has been implemented in more and more places, and subjective evaluation from the public perspective has received increasing attention. Fairness is an important factor in influencing the public’s evaluation of government performance. Social equity, as an important indicator of government performance evaluation, is one of the manifestations of government governance capacity (). Research shows that objective inequality reduces the public’s evaluation of government performance (). However, the underlying mechanisms by which individual experiences of inequality affect government performance evaluation remain unclear. This study developed and validated a chain mediation model to investigate the mechanism through which perceived inequality influences evaluations of government performance, aiming to provide both theoretical support and empirical evidence for improving such assessments. Moreover, the identified mechanism helps clarify how citizens’ subjective experiences shape their perceptions of government performance. proposed that an organization member’s sense of fairness is derived from comparing their own “outcome/input” ratio with that of others. When the two ratios are unequal, a sense of unfairness arises. It is generally believed that experiences of unequal treatment or major life setbacks are important sources of perceived injustice. Based on equity theory (), the public’s perception of social fairness is influenced by comparisons with others or with one’s own past experiences, which in turn affects their evaluation of the government (). Fairness can be differentiated into outcome fairness and distributive fairness. Outcome fairness refers to whether the final outcomes or benefits obtained by two or more individuals are equitable (). Distributive fairness, in contrast, pertains to whether individuals possess equal initial endowments or entitlements to participate in or compete for certain opportunities. It has also been defined as the set of conditions that afford individuals equivalent chances to achieve satisfactory outcomes (), thereby ensuring equality in expected final benefits rather than direct equality in actual payoffs. When distributive fairness is violated, individuals are prone to dissatisfaction, which may further aggravate social conflicts and spawn numerous social problems, ultimately hindering social development. Fairness is one of the key indicators in government performance evaluation. The public’s subjective assessment of social fairness, which encompasses rights, wealth, opportunities, respect, and other factors, influences their perception of fairness in society and, consequently, their evaluation of government performance. Thus, enhancing social fai