The Dynamic Measurement and Structure Decomposition of China's Multidimensional Poverty and Precision Poverty Alleviation

Zhang Quanhong; Li Bo; Zhou Qiang

doi:doi:10.16538/j.cnki.jfe.2017.04.003

Abstract

How to measure the multidimensional welfare deprivation and duration of poverty is recently a hot issue attracting attention from domestic and foreign theoretical circles, and is also the important theoretical basis of formulating precision poverty alleviation policy. This paper relies on the counting approach of Alkire & Foster (2011) for the measurement of multidimensional poverty in each time period and then on the duration approach of Foster (2009) for the measurement of chronic poverty, and constructs chronic and transient multidimensional poverty indicators. Then it empirically studies the poverty in China and makes urban-rural, indicator and region decompositions. It arrives at the conclusions as follows:firstly, from a multidimensional perspective, in terms of the sample, the proportion of chronic poverty is higher than the proportion of transient poverty, which is in direct contradiction to the conclusions from the analysis of chronic poverty and transient poverty from a single perspective of income; secondly, as for all types of poverty, the poverty contributions of education, medical insurance and health are ranked in the top three, but the contribution of health to chronic poverty is higher than the one to transient poverty; thirdly, on the whole, not only the degree of multidimensional poverty, but also poverty duration of many indicators in rural China are higher than urban China; fourthly, chronic multidimensional poverty in the middle and western regions with lower-level economic development is severer than that in the eastern and northeastern regions.