CCT and Rural Long-Term Poverty Reduction:International Experiences and China’s Practice

China’s anti-poverty strategy in the post-2020 era will focus on reducing chronic poverty and alleviating relative poverty.As a common international approach for long-term multidimensional poverty reduction,conditional cash transfer(CCT)payments reduce current poverty,prevent future poverty,and improve income distribution by providing poor households with cash allowances and promoting children’s human capital accumulation.For such reasons,CCT serves as an anti-poverty policy instrument worth referencing for China.This paper systematically reviewed the theoretical basis and development journey of CCT,the short-term and long-term implementation effects,as well as the decision-making basis,design and potential limitations.In this paper,we have further analyzed the poverty-reducing effects and problems of China’s rural public transfer payment policies in the current stage and discussed the achievements and inadequacies of China’s ongoing CCT pilot programs.Results indicate that the further development of CCT in China calls for a combination top-down and bottom-up policy-making approaches in project design and implementation,as well as an evolving poverty governance system complementary with other relevant policies.

Fiscal Livelihood Spending’s Effects on Multidimensional Poverty Reduction in China

This paper investigates how fiscal spending on livelihood improves multidimensional household poverty in China.Based on the panel data of the“China Health and Nutrition Survey”(CHNS)for 2004-2015,we measured the chronic multidimensional poverty index for Chinese households.We have created a multitiered model for empirical analysis.Our findings suggest that multidimensional poverty in China is predominantly capacity poverty.Fiscal spending on livelihoods significantly reduces multidimensional poverty for Chinese households,especially rural households.Investments on livelihoods are more poverty-reducing than transfer spending on livelihoods.As an innovation,this paper offers a dynamic analysis of the effects of livelihood spending on multidimensional household poverty controlling for heterogeneity between individual households and across regions.Our conclusion suggests that the government should improve policy arrangements to increase social opportunities and support sustainable development capacities for the poor,while enhancing protective social security systems.

The causes of chronic and transient poverty and the implications for poverty reduction policy in rural China

The study focuses on two components of total poverty:chronic and transient poverty,and investigates their relative importance in total observed poverty,as well as the determinants of each component.We find that transient poverty accounts for a large proportion of total poverty observed in the poor rural areas of China.By analyzing the determinants of the two types of poverty,we find that household demographic characteristics,such as age of the head of households,family sizes,labour participation ratio,and educational level of the head of the households,are very important to the poverty status of households.These factors matter more to chronic poverty than transient poverty,and have greater impacts on the poverty measured by consumption than that measured by income.Besides the demographic factors of households,other household factors like physical stocks,the composition of income,and the amount of cultivated lands also have significant effects on both chronic and transient poverty.It is also confirmed that change in cash holding and saving and borrowing grain are used by rural households to cope with income variation and smooth their consumption.Attributes of community where the households reside are also important to poverty.With very few exceptions,we do not find that poverty programs have significant impact on poverty reduction at the households’level.We interpret this as the poverty programs benefiting the wealthy more than the poor in a given poor area.The main reason for this could be that the implementation design of these programs fails to target the poor.