Abstract: It is of great significance to improve the accessibility and reduce the heavy economic burden of the under-privileged people and the vulnerable groups in the higher education service so as to promote the equitable sharing of higher education resources. At present, there are significant inequalities in the distribution of beneficiaries from different types of universities in China, for the high-quality higher education resources are concentrated in the eastern region. The nested decomposition effect based on the Theil index shows that the degree of contribution of government expenditures in the eastern, central and western regions is smaller, while the degree of contribution of government expenditure differences between the provinces in the region is relatively larger, of which the provinces in the eastern region have the largest differences in the government spending. This indicates that in addition to the factor of economic development level, the provincial government financial investment can significantly affect the distribution of benefits. In the future, we should establish the evaluation mechanism on the fulfillment of governments’ responsibility of expenditure, give full play to the central transfer payment in balancing the regional differences, and promote the fair benefit of government expenditure on higher education.

Key words: government higher education expenditure; benefit incidence; fairness of higher education; Theil index