How can social enterprises contribute to sustainable pro-poor tourism development?

"Tourism-Assisting the Poor" has been an important approach in anti-poverty strategy. Studies suggest that the conventional tourism model fails to generate benefits for the poor and to some extent enlarges the gap between the poor and the rich, which subsequently causes more social problems. Pro-poor tourism(PPT) is regarded as an alternative model. Precisely targeted assistance to the poor is the key to initiating this model, while the institutional change and implementation mechanism are essential to run it successfully and sustainably. Social entrepreneurship focusing on social values while adopting modern business philosophy has been introduced recently as an instrument in helping disadvantage population. This paper takes the Smangus community in Taiwan as an example to explore the role of social entrepreneurship and social enterprises in PPT development. It also discusses their implications for the anti-poverty practice in other regions including ethnic areas in China.

Comparative Research of Residents' Effect Perception and Participation Capacity and Willingness on Pro-poor Tourism

In this article,comparative research on residents' effect perception,participation capacity and willingness on Pro-poor Tourism( PPT) is given based on the questionnaire carried out in Wulong County and Fengjie County in Three Gorges Area,Chongqing,China. Some technologies,such as SPSS 13. 0,ANOVA and T-test are applied to analyze the data and results show Wulong residents' perception behavior is better than that of Fengjie residents. Moreover,the residents with different demographic characteristics have different participation behavior.Finally,multiple regression analysis is applied to identify the key factors influencing residents' perception behavior,that is participation willingness and positive economic effect perception,positive social and cultural effect perception and participation capacity.

Invigorating foreign aid administration:remittances’strategy,pro-poor and gender focus

Background:The pitfall of top-down approach to development is identified as a major cause of aid inefficiency.The approach is fraught with corruption and unethical practices that have bedeviled aid administration.Meanwhile,the impact of remittances has been widely acknowledged in the national development process.Methods:This study therefore reviews the extant foreign aid administrative norms and practices using various conceptual frameworks and diagrammatic representations with a view to identifying the inherent weaknesses in the process.Results:In the light of the findings,the study pitches its tent around the concept of remittances as a learning process for aid administration.Consequently,the pro-poor and gender focus approaches of remittances to development,as well as its bottomup approach is proposed as a conceptual framework for aid administration.Conclusions:The study concludes that,strict adherence to bottom-up approaches proposed in this article would keep corruption and other unethical practices which have rendered the aid administrative process inefficient,to the barest minimum.

Pro-Poor Tourism: Critical Perspective and Implications for Future Research

Tourism is viewed as a medium to reduce poverty.The pro-poor tourism (PPT) approach has therefore emerged as the medium for tourism development to influence poverty reduction. The approach stresses on tourism development in ways to accrue net benefits to the poor through diverse strategies including those that generate employmentopportunities, infrastructural development, and skills enhancement of locals in entrepreneurial activities. Also stressed is the inclusion of the poor in tourism decision making. While the pro-poor tourism approach has gained scholarly attention, much of these studies turned to assessed PPT impactson poverty reduction in communities with limited discussion on products development. Yet, product development is considered to be the means by which tourism can contribute to local economic development and by extension, poverty reduction. This paper examines the PPT concept and argues for PPT works to examine how products are develop to influence poverty reduction with recommendations of making PPT work for the poor. This follows with implications for further research works on PPT and its development.

Income Growth,Income Gaps,and Rural Poverty Reduction in China

This paper analyzes the evolving trends in China’s rural poverty from 1988 to 2018 and how income growth and income gaps contributed to poverty reduction using rural household data from the China Household Income Project(CHIP).We find that after China’s reform and opening up policy introduced in 1978,China’s rural poverty has been reduced substantially due primarily to income growth,although this poverty-reducing effect was partially offset by widening income gaps.During the progress of this poverty reduction,however,income distribution replaced income growth as the key driver.For the extremely poor in particular,their poverty status hinged upon income distribution.As revealed by our empirical analysis of income sources,wage income became the chief source of income for rural households,contributing a rising share to poverty reduction in the countryside.The contribution of net income from government transfer to poverty reduction has increased in recent years,and this contribution has been increased with the deepening level of poverty.Calculation of the pro-poor growth index suggests that the poor population primarily benefited from the trickle-down effect of economic growth,and the economic growth pattern has yet to lean towards pro-poor growth.

Measures of Relative and Absolute Convergence and Pro-poor Growth with an Illustration based on China(2010–2018)

Income mobility is a key issue for understanding the process of economic growth and distributional change.Some economists have used the concept of“pro-poor growth”to examine,with individual-level panel data,whether the poor benefit more than the rich from economic growth by tracking the extent of income mobility among different population subgroups.There is also literature in macroeconomics on the measurement of convergence.This paper introduces population-weighted relative and absolute indices of mobility,convergence,and pro-poor growth;it also distinguishes between anonymous and nonanonymous approaches to these issues.The empirical analysis is based on Chinese panel data for the period 2010–2018.In both absolute and relative terms,income growth in China was greater for individuals with an initially lower income but only for lower income deciles in relative terms.There was also an overall increase in individual welfare from anonymous and nonanonymous perspectives,which was higher among younger individuals.The welfare of the poor did not increase more than that of the nonpoor.These results shed light on the evolution of income distribution in China during the past decade's rapid economic growth.

Multidimensional Poverty and Poverty Reduction Policies in Rural China during 1995-2013

Using the multidimensional poverty index(MPI), this paper measures the intertemporal change in poverty in China's rural areas during 1995-2013, decomposes major poverty reduction factors, and creates a correlation between poverty reduction factors and national pro-farmer and poverty reduction policies. Our findings suggest that multidimensional poverty has been greatly alleviated in rural China on all fronts beyond the income dimension. Specifically, the burden of out-of-pocket medical expenses contributed the most to the overall poverty of farmers in the 1990s; this gap was subsequently mitigated by the New Rural Cooperative Medical Insurance System. Lack of economic empowerment-the second most prominent manifestation of poverty two decades ago-has been alleviated with public welfare improvements. In the present stage, health and healthcare are the primary difficulties facing poor farmers multidimensionally. Sub-groups such as elders,those less educated and those living in western China or in poor counties suffer from a high degree of poverty. This implies that multidimensional poverty is concentrated among the underprivileged groups and in less developed regions, whom should be policy priorities.Robustness tests suggest that the paper's conclusion still holds after changing the proxy variables of the subdimensions, revising weights or removing some dimensions.