Transient poverty, poverty dynamics, and vulnerability to poverty: An empirical analysis using a balanced panel from rural China.
Transient poverty, poverty dynamics, and vulnerability to poverty: An empirical analysis using a balanced panel from rural China.
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DOI：
10.1016/j.worlddev.2015.10.022
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发表时间：
2016-02-01
影响因子：
6.9
通讯作者：
Ward PS
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Ward PS
中国从1970年代末开始的经济改革带来了快速的经济增长，国内生产总值的年增长率平均每年超过10%，持续了30多年。在国民账户迅速增长的同时，贫困也迅速而广泛地减少。然而，随着贫困的减少，经常可以看到城乡之间以及城乡内部的收入不平等加剧。这种不断扩大的收入差距挑战了中国经济改革像贫困统计数据所显示的那样成功的观点。在本文中，我们建议另一种观点是考虑这些改革对改变贫困的长期性质和减少家庭贫困脆弱性的影响。利用1991年至2006年中国农村的平衡面板，我们发现，我们样本中的大多数贫困已经从长期性质转变为暂时性的，家庭要么转变为非贫困状态，要么进入贫困状态。在我们的样本中，易受贫困影响的程度随着时间的推移而下降，但这种下降在时间或空间上并不一致。我们将家庭脆弱性状态分解为两个直接原因：低预期收入和高收入波动性，发现脆弱性越来越多地归因于收入波动性。此外，我们表明，弱势家庭有非常不同的特点比非弱势家庭。
China’s economic reforms starting in the late 1970s have resulted in rapid economic growth, with annual growth in gross domestic product averaging greater than 10 percent per year for more than thirty years. Accompanying this rapid growth in national accounts have been rapid and widespread reductions in poverty. With these reductions in poverty, however, there has often been observed an increase in income inequality, both between as well as within rural and urban sectors. This rising income gap challenges the notion that economic reforms in China have been as successful as the poverty statistics would suggest. In this paper, we suggest that an alternative view would be to consider the effects of these reforms on changing the chronic nature of poverty and reducing household vulnerability to poverty. Using a balanced panel from rural China from 1991 through 2006, we find that most poverty among our sample has shifted from being chronic in nature to being transient, with households either shifting into a state of being non-poor moving in and out of poverty. Among our sample, vulnerability to poverty has been declining over time, but the declines are not uniform over time or space. We decompose household vulnerability status into two proximate causes: low expected income and high income variability, finding vulnerability increasingly due to income variability. Additionally, we demonstrate that vulnerable households have very different characteristics than non-vulnerable households.