China's poverty reduction miracle and relative poverty: Focusing on the roles of growth and inequality

Guanghua Wan, Xiaoshan Hu and Weiqun Liu

China Economic Review, 2021, vol. 68, issue C

Abstract: Miracle reductions in absolute poverty led China to announce, in late 2019, the strategic change from targeting absolute poverty to targeting relative poverty. After highlighting China's success in the fight against absolute poverty, this paper attempts to assess the roles of growth and income inequality in affecting both absolute and relative poverty rates. Poverty decomposition and panel-VAR modelling results show that growth played an overwhelming role in achieving the miracle of poverty reduction but relative poverty has been consistently rising. And growth, contrary to the case of absolute poverty, actually has contributed to the rising trend of relative poverty. Conversely, income inequality has played a small role in aggravating absolute poverty but a moderate role in raising relative poverty. Therefore, it seems appropriate for China to continue targeting absolute poverty with a higher poverty line. In the case that China insists on shifting the poverty alleviation strategy, market-led growth can no longer be relied on to reduce relative poverty. Instead, government-led pro-poor policies must be instituted by providing employment, education, training and other opportunities to the disadvantaged groups, in addition to the usual social assistance.

Keywords: Poverty reduction; Absolute poverty; Relative poverty; Poverty decomposition; Panel-VAR; China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I32 O53 P36 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (24)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1043951X21000614
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:chieco:v:68:y:2021:i:c:s1043951x21000614

DOI: 10.1016/j.chieco.2021.101643

Access Statistics for this article

China Economic Review is currently edited by B.M. Fleisher, K. X. D. Huang, M.E. Lovely, Y. Wen, X. Zhang and X. Zhu

More articles in China Economic Review from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().