省际对口支援与农户生活水平提升——基于消费视角的实证检验

Inter-provincial Counterpart Assistance and Improvement of Farmers’Living Standards:An Empirical Test Based on the Perspective of Consumption

中国脱贫攻坚创造了人类历史上的减贫奇迹,文章以贫困户生活消费水平为研究视角,考察脱贫攻坚实践中省际对口支援的重要作用。文章基于2000-2014年中国省级面板数据,采用合成控制法评估了对口支援对当地农户生活消费水平的影响效果。研究发现:对口支援显著推进了受援地区农户人均生活消费总支出水平,政策净处理效应约为21%-24%。这一结果在多种稳健性检验下保持一致。从消费明细看,在对口支援实施后相较于对照组地区,受援地农户各项生活消费支出均有提升,尤其是食品、居住和交通通信的消费攀升较为明显。对于上述结果,文章结合对口支援制度和政策实践进行了机制识别与理论解释。文章采用农户家庭恩格尔指数这一相对贫困指标对上述结果进行验证,发现农户食品支出在总消费支出中的比重显著下降,这表明对口支援提升了农户收入水平,并且农户恩格尔指数的降低并不是以食品消费支出的下降为代价。这意味着对口支援真正改善了本地农户生活水平,因而文章为对口支援在中国脱贫奇迹中的突出贡献提供了直接证据。文章的研究对于在当前新发展阶段下,推进和巩固脱贫成果与乡村振兴有效衔接具有一定的现实启示作用。

In 2021,the No.1 document of the central government takes“promoting rural revitalization in an all-round way”as the focus of rural work in the future,and proposes“deepening and expanding consumption assistance”.At present,under the new development pattern,increasing farmers’income and enhancing consumption are not only related to consolidating the results of poverty alleviation and the effective connection of rural revitalization,but also related to the formation of a strong domestic market with the help of consumer demand to drive supply,and to give full play to the basis of consumption in the new dual-circulation development pattern.Sexuality and leading role are the core propositions of the“14th Five-Year Plan”period.Based on China’s provincial panel data from 2000 to 2014,this article uses a synthetic control method to evaluate the impact of counterpart assistance on the living consumption level of local farmers.The study finds that counterpart assistance has significantly promoted the per capita total living consumption expenditure of rural households in aided areas,and the net treatment effect of the policy is about 21%-24%.The results remain consistent under multiple robustness tests.This article combines the counterpart support system and policy practice to carry out mechanism identification and theoretical explanation.Furthermore,it uses the rural household Engel’s Coefficient,a relative poverty indicator,to verify the above results.The test results show that counterpart assistance has increased the income level of farmers,and the decrease in the Engel’s Coefficient of farmers is not at the expense of the decline in food consumption expenditure.The contributions of this article are as follows:First,this article provides direct empirical evidence for the important role of counterpart support in the process of poverty alleviation.The research has reference value for China’s poverty alleviation strategy transformation and rural revitalization in the relative poverty stage after 2020.Second,compared with similar studies,this article pays more attention to the impact of policies on micro-poor households,and is more conducive to investigating the effectiveness of policies.Moreover,this article enriches and expands the academic achievements in the field of policy evaluation of China’s poverty reduction practices from the new perspective of inter-provincial horizontal transfer payments.