Multidimensional Poverty in China: Findings Based on the CHNS

For a survey on poverty axioms and measures see Foster and Sen (1997).

In mainland China, there are three kinds of provincial-level administrative regions: provinces, municipalities, and autonomous regions. Guangxi is one of five autonomous regions. For simplicity, we use the term ‘province’ for all sample regions.

In China, migrant workers are defined as those registered as farmers and with rural residences but mainly making their livelihood from non-agricultural sectors. Migrant workers can be divided into two types of groups, local-migrant workers and out-migrant workers, depending on whether or not they are working within the township where they registered their residence.

In 2008, out-migrant workers working in the eastern provinces accounted for 71 % of total out-migrant workers in China. As China’s export-led sectors in coastal areas slowed down during the global financial crisis in 2009 and public transfer schemes in the less developed areas increased, more and more migrant workers chose to return to their own province rather than moving out.

Further analysis on the attrition sample and newly added sample shows that, in rural areas, the households that left the panel had—on average—significantly better economic status than those who remained in the panel; however, in urban areas, the difference in the economic status between the households that left the panel and those which remained is less significant, and in some cases, like urban Heilongjiang, the households that left the panel between wave 2000 and 2004 actually had a worse economic status than those which remained. However, the households which were added to the sample in replacement of those which left, had better economic status than the average. Moreover, in most cases, the difference in per capita income between added households and those in the original sample is comparable to that between dropped sample and those in the original sample, when the income growth between the subsequent waves is considered. The size of dropped and added samples varied in different provinces and waves; thus here we do not provide a general comparison of them.

Traditionally the government used an official absolute poverty line to monitor rural poverty, and the line in 2007 was set at CNY 785 per person per year. However, the standard is widely criticized and is thought to be too low to reflect the real picture of China’s rural poverty (CDRF 2007). In 2000, the government also introduced the low income line to monitor the situation of relative poverty of rural households, and the line was set at CNY 1027 in 2007. In 2008, the State Council Leading Group Office of Poverty Alleviation and Development announced the unification of the two lines and used CNY 1027 in 2007 as the only poverty line. In November 2011, the government further increased the rural official poverty line to CNY 2300 per person at 2010 prices. Considering the price inflation in rural areas, this new poverty standard in 2008 was CNY 2227 per person per year.

Urban poverty in China has not raised concerns widely until China accelerated the reform of state-owned enterprises in the late 1990s. Although many scholars and organizations made efforts to measure urban poverty since then, there is currently no widely accepted income poverty line in China’s urban areas. However, in the late 1990s, China launched the Minimum Living Allowance System in urban areas and the standard of the system was used to identify whether the household should be provided with a certain allowance, so as to meet their basic needs. Hence the standard of Minimum Living Allowance could be seen as one kind of poverty line. Due to a huge diversity of economic development among different regions, the standards vary considerably. In 2010, the average standard of Minimum Living Allowance was CNY 251.2/month per person; thus we adopt this standard as urban poverty line. Using this standard of poverty could help improve poverty monitoring for government policymaking.

According to the Chinese Ministry of Health, China launched the programs for improving access to clean water and improved sanitation facilities in the 1960s and scaled up these programs in 1980s. By the end of 2005, more than 95 % of the population had access to primarily improved water and 55 % of the population had improved sanitation facilities. Considering that the quality standard for this primarily improved water is still very low, the government decided to set universal access to piped water in rural areas as a policy target; hence, this paper chose having no access to piped water as the deprivation cutoff.

Compared to the international normal range 18.5–24.99, Asians’ range of normal BMI is lower, between 18.5 and 22.9 kg/m². Asians with a BMI ≥ 23.0 are considered to be overweight. Thus the international cutoff for censoring overweight and obesity is not applicable to China (Zhou 2002), but the cutoff for identifying the underweight is still applicable to China and has been widely used to analyse the health status of the Chinese people (see, e. g., Zhou 2002; Tang et al. 2007; Zhang et al. 2005).

For further discussion on the nested weighting structure see Alkire and Foster (2007, 2011) and for a discussion on the meaning of weights see Decancq and Lugo (2012).

Note that results in Table 5 are not weighted by the population in the provinces concerned.

Poverty intensity is obtained as M₀/H ₀ .

According to recent statistics, the urban/rural mean income ratio has decreased from 3.33 in 2009 to 3.23 in 2010, and it decreased to 3.13 in 2011, which was close the level of 2002.