Poverty Dynamics of Households in Rural China

Katsushi Imai and Jing You

No DP2013-16, Discussion Paper Series from Research Institute for Economics & Business Administration, Kobe University

Abstract: The objective of our study is to identify patterns and causes of households' transitions in and out of poverty using the long household panel data on rural China in the period 1989-2009. We propose a discrete-time multi-spell duration model that not only corrects for correlated unobserved heterogeneity across transitions and various destinations within the transition, but also addresses the endogeneity due to dynamic selection associated with household's livelihood strategies. Duration dependence is generally found to be negative for both poverty exit and entry. The household choosing either farming or out-migration as a main livelihood strategy was more likely to escape from the persistent poverty than those taking local non-agricultural employment. Overall, the present study emphasises the central role of agriculture in helping the chronically poor escape from poverty.

Keywords: Poverty Transition; Discrete-time duration model; Correlated unobserved heterogeneity; Dynamic selection; Rural China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C33 C41 I32 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 34 pages
Date: 2013-04, Revised 2013-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-cna, nep-dev and nep-tra
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

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https://www.rieb.kobe-u.ac.jp/academic/ra/dp/English/DP2013-16.pdf Revised version, 2013 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Poverty Dynamics of Households in Rural China (2014)
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