基础设施、生计资本与农村减贫——基于中国家庭追踪调查的经验研究

Infrastructure Condition, Livelihood Capital and Rural Poverty Reduction—Empirical Research Based on Chinese Family Panel Studies

利用中国家庭追踪调查(CFPS)2014年的数据,以家庭为分析单位,在可持续生计的框架下讨论农村基础设施的减贫效应。本文从家庭收入、家庭支出和贫困发生率三个方面衡量减贫效应,研究交通基础设施和自来水基础设施对农村贫困的影响。研究发现,在控制了生计资本、生计策略和脆弱性背景的情况下,基础设施具有显著的减贫效应。使用通路时长作为交通基础设施的工具变量,发现由于内生性问题的存在,低估了交通基础设施的减贫效应。倾向值匹配的结果表明,自来水基础设施减贫效应的估计较为准确,内生性问题不构成挑战。机制分析发现生计多样化在交通基础设施的减贫效应中起到了部分的中介作用。基于分样本的回归分析发现,基础设施和生计多样化对于农村家庭存在异质性影响。深入推进扶贫攻坚需要加强基础设施建设,促进农户生计多样化,对极端贫困家庭切实做好精准扶贫。

Based on the 2014 China Family Panel Studies(CFPS) data, this paper takes family as the unit of analysis and discusses the poverty reduction effects of rural infrastructure within the framework of sustainable livelihoods. This paper measures poverty reduction effects from the following three aspects: household income, household expenditure, and poverty incidence, and studies the impact of transportation infrastructure and water infrastructure on rural poverty. The study found that infrastructure has significant poverty reduction effects while controlling for livelihood capital, livelihood strategies, and vulnerability background. Using the time when the newly-build road was put into use as an instrumental variable for the transportation infrastructure, it was found that the poverty alleviation effect of the transportation infrastructure was underestimated due to the endogenous problem. The PSM results show that the estimation of the poverty reduction effect of the tap water infrastructure is not biased by the endogeneity. Mechanism analysis found that livelihood diversification has a partial mediation impact on the poverty reduction effects of transport infrastructure. A sub-sample regression analysis suggest that infrastructure and livelihood diversification have heterogeneous effects on rural households. In this view, poverty could be reduced by strengthening infrastructure construction, promoting the diversification of rural households’ livelihoods, and ensuring accurate poverty alleviation for extremely poor families.