A Quantitative Analysis of Policy Coordination for Elderly Care and Childcare in Xi’an,China

Abstract

Against the dual pressures of population ageing and the parallel promotion of fertility support, elderly care and childcare in Chinese cities are shifting from sectoral governance towards cross-departmental, cross-instrument and multi-level coordination. This paper takes policies on elderly care and childcare in Xi’an between 2016 and 2026 as its object and constructs a three-level corpus of 57 policy documents issued by the central government, Shaanxi Province and the municipality, from which 27 formal municipal documents are selected as the core empirical sample. Drawing on policy instrument theory, network governance theory and the policy mix perspective, and using content analysis, social network analysis and composite index measurement, the paper examines local coordination along four dimensions: actor coordination, instrument coordination, target integration and vertical alignment. Four findings emerge. First, policy evolution shows a transition from parallel elderly care and childcare lines to comprehensive coordination, with markedly more integrated and community-embedded policies after 2023. Second, service capacity, fiscal and financial support, planning and land, and facility supply are used intensively, whereas government purchasing, information technology and human capital supply are relatively underused, leaving demand-side instruments weak. Third, the responsibility co-occurrence network comprises 28 nodes and 174 ties with a density of 0.460; civil affairs, finance, health and development-reform occupy central positions, but responsibility co-occurrence does not fully coincide with joint issuance. Fourth, under theoretical weighting the Policy Coordination Index reaches a stage peak of 0.729 in 2023 and remains comparatively high in 2024, although annual values are clearly affected by sample size and document type; entropy, CRITIC and bootstrap tests confirm the robustness of the 2023–2024 rise. The paper proposes improving local coordination through a regularised coordination mechanism, stronger demand-side instruments, cross-departmental data and budget coordination, integration of elderly care and childcare in community settings, and a closed evaluation loop. Its contribution is to bring policy instruments, departmental networks and vertical transmission into one framework and to provide a reproducible text quantification path for city-level research on elderly care and childcare public service policy.