Abstract
After building a moderately prosperous society in all respects, China will continue to consolidate and expand its achievements in poverty eradication, promote the Rural Revitalization Strategy, and take the realization of common prosperity for all people as the focus of the next stage of work. To consolidate and expand the poverty alleviation achievements and realize rural revitalization, the problems of returning to poverty and deepening poverty must be solved. On the one hand, we need to better monitor the poor population dynamically, find the people returning to poverty in time, and provide immediate assistance to gradually reduce the rate at which people return to poverty. On the other hand, we need to better identify the poor through multidimensional indicators by accounting for non-income dimensions such as energy and health, more effectively targeting poor groups, and meet the people's needs for a better life.In the process of realizing common prosperity, we must strengthen the construction of basic, inclusive, and comprehensive livelihood security. The social assistance system is an important policy guarantee for China to alleviate poverty and achieve common prosperity. It is a long-term institutional arrangement for China's future assistance and assistance to low-income people. It plays an important strategic role in poverty alleviation in the battle against poverty. It is of great significance for expanding middle-income groups, building a reasonable income distribution pattern, and realizing common prosperity.
Based on the micro survey data of the CFPS, we examine the impact of social assistance on China's long-term poverty, intergenerational poverty, and energy poverty through empirical methods. Long-term and intergenerational poverty are closely related to the rate at which poor families return to poverty, and energy poverty is an important embodiment of the deep poverty of poor families. Long-term poverty refers to whether poor families are in poverty for most of the time within several years after receiving subsidies, and intergenerational poverty is related to whether poverty will continue to be transmitted from parents to children. To reduce t the rate at which poor people return to poverty, we need to help poor families achieve sustained and stable poverty alleviation to reduce the incidence of long-term poverty. This would help the children of poor families obtain the human capital needed for self-reliance and development and further prevent the intergenerational transmission of poverty. This is also closely related to the state's proposal of "supporting the will before poverty alleviation, and poverty alleviation must support intelligence." To solve the problem of long-term poverty, we need to tap the internal driving force of poor families to get rid of poverty and help poor families achieve self-hematopoiesis and self-development to ensure long-term, stable poverty eradication, which is the internal requirement of "supporting the will before poverty alleviation." To address intergenerational poverty, it is necessary to enhance the human capital accumulation and self-development ability of adolescents from poor rural families, which is also in line with the internal requirement that "poverty alleviation must support intelligence." Energy poverty means that the poor are unable to obtain clean, safe, stable, and reliable modern energy supply. The incidence of energy poverty in rural areas of China is high, which affects the normal production and labor activities of poor families, and it has a great negative impact on the health of poor families, especially on teenagers. It is closely related to the multidimensional poverty of income, health, and education in rural areas. It is a deep poverty problem that also needs urgent attention in rural areas.
Studying the impact of social assistance on the long-term poverty and intergenerational poverty of Chinese assisted families will help us move beyond the perspective of current or temporary poverty, deeply understand and analyze the role of China's social assistance system in addressing the poverty of assisted families from a longer-term perspective, and further improve the social assistance system to reduce the rate of families returning to poverty in the future. Investigating the impact of the social assistance system on the energy poverty of Chinese assisted families will help us move beyond the perspective of poverty based solely on income, and instead conduct a comprehensive evaluation and analysis of the role of China's social assistance system in addressing deep-seated poverty, including relative poverty and deep-seated poverty in rural areas. These efforts are of great significance in improving the social assistance system, unlocking its potential to alleviate poverty, and enabling the country to consolidate and expand its achievements in poverty alleviation, ultimately achieving common prosperity.
In terms of long-term poverty, we first use the duration analysis method to establish an index to measure China's long-term poverty of income dimension. We study the impact of the minimum living standard allowance on the long-term poverty of rural assisted families. On this basis, we further examine the impact of social assistance on China's urban long-term poverty of income and China's rural multidimensional long-term poverty.
For rural areas, first, based on CFPS data from 2012 to 2018 and combined with the data on minimum living standard allowances at the district and county levels published by the Ministry of Civil Affairs, we use the proportion of minimum living standard allowances at these levels as an instrumental variable. We then study the impact of minimum living standard allowance on the long-term poverty of income dimension in rural areas of China using several methods, including a two-stage least squares analysis. The results show that social assistance such as minimum living standard allowances has a poor effect on alleviating long-term poverty in rural areas, especially in areas with low subsistence allowances. After a variety of robustness tests, such as sub-sample regression, changing the instrumental variable, and changing the dependent variable, our conclusion remains valid. Through a further mechanism analysis, we find that this may be because after receiving the minimum living security assistance, the labor supply and productive investment of rural assisted families decreased, and then the non-transfer payment income also decreased, indicating that there may be a certain phenomenon of "raising lazy people" via the rural minimum living standard allowance. In the minimum living standard allowance data in 2012, the average subsistence allowance received by each family was only 1,449 yuan for the whole year, which was lower than the national poverty standard at that time. We argue that in the future, a long-term mechanism to adjust the minimum living standard should be established so that the minimum living standard allowance can be steadily improved with the level of economic development and help poor people share the fruits of economic development. To further improve the long-term poverty alleviation effect of the social assistance system represented by the rural minimum living security in rural areas, we believe that it is also necessary to formulate incentive compatible poverty reduction and poverty prevention policies, encourage recipients to increase their labor supply and productive investment, and tap the endogenous driving force of low-income families to get rid of poverty.
For urban areas, we use the 2010-2018 CFPS data to study the impact of social assistance on long-term poverty in terms of income for urban-assisted families. The results show that access to social assistance in 2010 effectively reduced the probability of urban-assisted families living in income-dimension long-term poverty from 2012 to 2018. After changing the dependent variable, changing the regression model, and applying other robustness tests, this conclusion is still valid. We find that the impact of social assistance on the long-term poverty of urban-assisted families in different regions is uneven. Social assistance reduces the probability of long-term poverty in the income dimension of urban assisted families in the middle and Eastern regions of China, but it has no effect on assisted families in the western region of China. Through a further mechanism analysis, we find that social assistance can reduce the probability of long-term poverty in the future by improving the labor supply and non-transfer payment income of urban-assisted families in the Middle and Eastern regions of China. Western urban-assisted families mainly use the social assistance funds for food and transfer expenditures. Although the welfare of these families has improved, it does not have the function of being self-sufficient. Therefore, social assistance has a low impact on long-term poverty reduction. In the future, we should further formulate incentive compatible poverty reduction and prevention policies, encourage recipients in the western region to increase their labor supply and productive investment, and enhance the self-development awareness and ability of these families.
By studying the effect of social assistance in reducing poverty in rural and urban areas, we find that social assistance can play a positive role in improving residents' consumption welfare and quality of life. It encourages residents to increase their expenditure on consumption, food, culture, and entertainment. However, in terms of the self-hematopoietic function of social assistance and its impact on the self-development ability of recipients, regional differences are more obvious. In the eastern region, which is better developed, the self-hematopoietic function of the social assistance system is better, and the improvement in the labor supply, productive investment, and non-transfer payment incomes of the recipients is ideal. In the Western region, where the task of poverty alleviation is arduous, the recipients lack the awareness of self-reliance and self-development, and the self-hematopoietic function of the social assistance system needs to be improved. To expand the self-hematopoietic function of the social assistance system, we suggest further expanding the coverage of social assistance in the western region, increasing the investment of social assistance funds, and appropriately encouraging the assisted families to increase labor supply and productive investment so assisted families can gradually realize self-hematopoietic and self-development.
The conclusions illustrate that, whether it is the minimum living standard allowance or social assistance, to recall its effect of sustained poverty reduction, it is necessary to stimulate the internal poverty alleviation motivation of the recipient group, stimulate the recipient group to increase the labor supply, and thereby obtain stable non-transfer payment income. At the same time, it also shows that China's minimum living standard allowances and social assistance in the central and eastern regions and more developed provinces are generally better at reducing poverty than those in the western regions and less developed provinces.
In terms of intergenerational poverty, poverty alleviation must support wisdom, and an important step to block the intergenerational transmission of poverty is to improve the education level and human capital accumulation of rural youth. Therefore, we also analyze this issue. Using CFPS data from 2012 to 2018, we study the impact of social assistance on children's education investment of rural assisted families. The results show that access to social assistance will significantly increase the total expenditure of families on education for adolescents, and this positive impact is more obvious for rural families and non-one-child families in central and western China. Through a further mechanism and expansion analysis, we find that access to social assistance will enhance the family's concern for children's education, enhance the family's expectations for children's education, and encourage families to increase educational investment behaviors such as extracurricular counseling fees for children, resulting in an increase in the proportion of children's education expenditure in the family's annual income. At the same time, families will save more for education to maintain a continuous investment in children's education. This result shows that the social assistance system not only increased human capital investment in rural teenagers but also blocked the intergenerational transmission of poverty. It is also conducive to reducing the difference in future human capital accumulation between rural children in the central and western regions and rural children in the eastern region. This will reduce the development difference between the central and western regions and the eastern region in the future and enhance the coordination of regional development. Based on these findings, we suggest ways to expand the coverage of the social assistance system in rural areas, especially in the central and western rural areas, and increase the investment of social assistance funds and special funds for education.
In terms of energy poverty, we first expound on the importance of energy poverty research. Energy poverty is a type of deep-seated poverty that requires urgent attention after the elimination of absolute poverty. The incidence of energy poverty is high in rural areas, and energy poverty negatively affects the production and life of poor families, which is not conducive to lasting and stable poverty alleviation. Next, based on the previous literature and the actual situation in China, we construct a four-dimensional energy poverty index that includes affordability, availability, cleanliness, and modernity to measure the energy poverty of Chinese families. On this basis, we use CFPS data from 2012 to 2014 to explore the impact of social assistance on the multidimensional energy poverty of rural households in China. The results show that access to social assistance reduces the probability of rural-assisted families in multidimensional energy poverty, and it weakens the four dimensions of energy poverty of rural-assisted families. After several robustness tests, such as sub-sample regression, changing the independent variable, and changing the dependent variable, our conclusion remains valid. Moreover, this impact is more obvious for rural families in the central and western regions and young and middle-aged groups, and it is not obvious for rural families in the eastern region and elderly groups. Through a further mechanism analysis, we find that access to social assistance will reduce the probability of multidimensional energy poverty by increasing the power consumption, heating expenditure, non-transfer payment income, and improving the energy consumption structure of assisted families. Access to social assistance increased the number of household appliances, heating expenditures, and non-transfer payment income of assisted families. The proportion of electricity use in energy consumption increased, while the proportion of coal use decreased. According to these results, we propose solutions such as expanding the coverage of social assistance systems in rural areas, especially in the central and western rural areas, increasing the investment in special energy funds, and paying more attention to the energy poverty of elderly groups.
| Date of Award | 25 Apr 2023 |
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| Original language | English |
| Awarding Institution |
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| Supervisor | Dongshu LIU (Supervisor), Junlin Li (External Supervisor) & Liang DONG (Supervisor) |
Keywords
- Social assistance
- Poverty eradication
- Life cycle
- Multidimensional poverty