中国沿海与内地贫困差异之解析:基于回归的分解方法

本文提出了一个分解框架,旨在量化相关决定因素对贫困空间差异或跨时变化的贡献。同时,本文引入了Shorrocks and Wan(2008)提出的数据生成法,以便将分组数据转化成微观个体数据。把这些方法论运用于中国,我们解析了中国内地与沿海城市间的贫困差异。研究结果表明,内地的高贫困主要归因于资源利用效率的低下而不是资源禀赋的欠缺;收入分配的不平等也是造成内地高贫困的又一重要原因。贸易、FDI等衡量经济开放度的指标与贫困之间的关系因时因地而不同。     

How does foreign direct investment affect economic growth in China?

How does inward foreign direct investment (FDI) affect a transitional economy? This study attempts to analyze the role of FDI in China’s income growth and market‐oriented transition. We first identify possible channels through which FDI may have positive or negative effects on the Chinese economy. Using a growth model and cross‐section and panel data for the period 1984‐98, we provide an empirical assessment, which suggests that FDI seems to help China’s transition and promote income growth, and that this positive growth effect seems to rise over time and to be stronger in the coastal than the inland regions. JEL classification: F21, F23, O53.     

A NON‐PARAMETRIC MEASURE OF POVERTY ELASTICITY

We estimate the growth elasticity of poverty (GEP) using recently developed non‐parametric panel methods and the most up‐to‐date and extensive poverty data from the World Bank, which exceeds 500 observations in size and represents more than 96 percent of the developing world's population. Unlike previous studies which rely on parametric models, we employ a non‐parametric approach which captures the non‐linearity in the relationship between growth, inequality, and poverty. We find that the growth elasticity of poverty is higher for countries with fairly equal income distributions, and declines in nations with greater income disparities. Moreover, when controlling for differences in estimation technique, we find that the reported values of the GEP in the literature (based on the World Bank's now‐defunct 1993‐PPP based poverty data) are systematically larger in magnitude than estimates based on the latest 2005‐PPP based data.     

中国居民物质性消费与收入关系及其空间特征

对1993年起中国开始步入过剩经济时代进行了实证分析，给出了沿海与内地城镇及农村居民物质性消费与收入的恩格尔函数及其特征；在收入－消费关系空间特征分析的基础上，指出居民消费倾向内地高于沿海，内地城镇高于农村。最后从居民物质性消费与收入关系及空间特征角度讨论了现阶段加速中西部地区发展的必要性与合理性。     

A Consistent Poverty Approach to Assessing the Sensitivity of Income Poverty Measures and Trends

This paper examines the sensitivity of estimates of income poverty rates and trends to variations in the poverty line and to whether or not certain households are included or excluded from the sample used to estimate poverty. The approach draws on the concept of consistent poverty, which has been used to identify those with incomes below the poverty line who also experience deprivation. Our approach involves excluding households with incomes below the poverty line if they report zero or negative income or are self‐employed, have expenditure well in excess of their income, have substantial wealth holdings, or if they do not report having experienced financial stress over the past year. The combined impact of all four exclusions is to reduce the half‐median income poverty rate from 9.9 per cent to 5.4 per cent, but also suggests that poverty increased by more over the decade to 2003–04 than the original estimates indicate.     

中国贫困的多维测度

本文认为,用单一的收入标准来了解贫困会低估个体真实的贫困状况,很难全面反映个体贫困的复杂性、脆弱性和持久性。本文基于Sen的能力方法,使用中国健康营养调查数据,利用模糊集方法测度中国的多维贫困状况。结论显示,相对于收入贫困,个体的教育、健康和医疗保险等贫困状况更为严重;多维贫困关于测度方法、权重较敏感,等权重下的AF多维贫困被其它方法与权重下的多维贫困严格占优,而在Betti＆Verma权重下的AF多维贫困中,则住房、卫生设施和健康对多维贫困的贡献更大;多维贫困在西部、农村及女性中依然更严重。     

Contributions of Longitudinal Data to Poverty Measurement in Australia*

Chronic poverty is of greater social consequence than transitory poverty but its measurement requires longitudinal data. This article uses six waves of data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey to explore the extent to which longitudinal data contribute to what is known about poverty from cross‐section data. We find an imperfect correspondence between people’s annual poverty status and chronic poverty status. Consequently, policies that aim to reduce chronic poverty using means‐tested benefits may be partially misdirected if beneficiaries are identified using annual income. Furthermore, some households experiencing chronic poverty may fall through the safety net.     

Policy for Poverty Alleviation and Income Redistribution with Quasi-Public Goods

This paper proposes a theoretical framework for a poverty‐alleviation program with quasi‐public goods and presents four main effects. First, this policy succeeds in self‐selection, which identifies low‐productive persons under imperfect information and allows them to receive at least the minimum income. Second, we can observe income redistribution by this scheme without any taxes. Third, the program contributes cost‐effectiveness in many cases. Finally, it makes clear that this policy is suitable, especially in areas where low‐income people are concentrated.     

Income distribution and economic development: Insights from machine learning

We draw upon recent advances that combine causal inferences with machine learning, to show that poverty is the key income distribution measure that matters for development outcomes. In a predictive framework, we first show that LASSO chooses only the headcount measure of poverty from 37 income distribution measures in predicting schooling, institutional quality, and per capita income. Next, causal inferences with post‐LASSO models indicate that poverty matters more strongly for development outcomes than does the Gini coefficient. Finally, instrumental variable estimates in conjunction with post‐LASSO models show that compared to Gini, poverty is more strongly causally associated with schooling and per capita income, but not institutional quality. Our results question the literature's overwhelming focus on the Gini coefficient. At the least, our results imply that the causal link from inequality (as measured by Gini) to development outcomes is tenuous.     

Short-term trends in China’s income inequality and poverty: evidence from a longitudinal household survey

In the past three decades, income inequality in China has increased rapidly relative to both China’s own past and other countries at similar levels of economic development. Using recent longitudinal data from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), this article examines changes in income inequality and poverty prevalence between 2010 and 2012. Surprisingly, we find a modest decline in income inequality as measured by the Gini coefficients in the CFPS data. The urban–rural gap narrowed, with rural families enjoying faster income growth than urban families enjoyed. Income growth was greater for middle-income families than for families with either high or low incomes in 2010. By all measures, poverty was greatly reduced between 2010 and 2012. Two-thirds of families that had been poor in 2010 escaped poverty by 2012.     

Calculating Poverty Measures from the Generalised Beta Income Distribution

Data for measuring poverty are frequently available in a summary form that describes the proportion of income or expenditure for each of a number of population proportions. While various discrete poverty measures can be applied directly to data in this limited form, they typically require an arbitrary approach to within‐group interpolation. This problem can be overcome by fitting either a parametric income distribution or a Lorenz curve to the grouped data and computing the required quantities from estimated parameters. The Lorenz curve approach is widely used by the World Bank, but can encounter problems. As an alternative, in this article we show how to calculate several poverty measures from parameters of the generalized beta income distribution, and its popular special cases. An analysis of poverty changes in countries from South and Southeast Asia is used to illustrate the methodology.     

Economic growth and growth linkages in China 1994–2003

This paper investigates to what extent income growth in the Chinese provinces is linked to growth and income levels in neighboring provinces. We find that the rate of income growth in a province is positively related to income and growth in neighboring provinces. However, we find no evidence of such positive interdependence between growth in rich coastal provinces and their immediate inland neighbors. This suggests that there has been little synchronization in economic growth rates between these regions, and/or that the immediate hinterland of the coastal growth centers might have been bypassed as China's manufacturing sector has migrated westward.     

Income Inequality in Rural China: Regression-based Decomposition Using Household Data

A considerable literature exists on the measurement of income inequality in China and its increasing trend. Much less is known about the driving forces of this trend and their quantitative contributions. Conventional decompositions, by factor components or by population subgroups, provide only limited information on the determinants of income inequality. This paper represents an early attempt to apply the regression‐based decomposition framework to the study of inequality accounting in rural China, using household‐level data. It is found that geography has been the dominant factor but is becoming less important in explaining total inequality. Capital input emerges as a most significant determinant of income inequality. Farming structure is more important than labor and other inputs in contributing to income inequality across households.     

Three Poverties in Urban China

Radical economic reform and rapid marketization in the late 1990s could be expected to create new poverty and insecurity in Chinese cities. Accordingly, the extent and nature of poverty in urban China is examined by means of a 1999 cross‐section household survey. Three types of poverty—“income and consumption”, “income not consumption” and “consumption not income”—are distinguished. A large proportion of the poor have income above, but consumption below, the poverty line. The estimated consumption function shows the importance of consumption smoothing, of precautionary considerations, of saving for investment opportunities, and of special needs related to the presence of children or sickness. An exercise is conducted to compare the three types of poverty by decomposing the divergence in the consumption of each poverty group from its benchmark consumption. Unpredicted financial assets and income, and differences in special needs, are important in contrasting and explaining the three poverties.     

经济增长与农村反贫困

本文利用中国家庭收入项目(CHIP)调查数据,估计了1988-2002年期间的中国农村绝对贫困、收入差距的变化趋势及收入增长和收入分配变化对农村贫困的影响.根据CHIP调查数据所绘制的贫困发生曲线表明,不论把绝对贫困线确定在哪里,在该时期内中国农村贫困都在显著下降.贫困指数分解和面板数据回归结果均显示收入增长是导致贫困下降的主要原因.     

中国城镇家庭能源贫困评估*——基于微观调查数据的研究

我国扶贫工作重点已进入新阶段,从消除绝对贫困向缓解发展不平衡、不充分的相对贫困转变,从解决收入贫困向解决多维贫困转变,从重点解决农村贫困问题向统筹城乡扶贫转变。能源是人民生活质量的重要指标,能有效反映福利水平。了解我国城镇家庭能源消费的基本特征、准确测度能源贫困水平与分布,有助于为今后扶贫工作提供资料基础和科学管理依据。本文构建消费者能源消费决策分析框架,并运用第一次中国家庭能源消费调查数据,考察居民收入与能源消费之间的关系,并对中国城镇家庭能源贫困状况进行测度。研究发现,居民收入与能源消费之间存在S型非线性关系,能源价格、家庭特征、地域特征等因素在能源消费决策中都发挥重要影响。我国城镇家庭相对能源贫困较为严重,主要表现为能源可支付性问题。能源贫困率在20%左右,其中电力贫困程度更为严重,超过25%。家庭收入增长、户主受教育程度提高、城市电力基础设施的普及、城市环境规制水平的提升会显著降低城镇家庭陷入能源贫困的可能性,而电力价格上涨会显著增加城镇家庭陷入能源贫困的概率。     

“收入导向型”多维贫困的识别与流动性研究*——基于CFPS调查数据农村子样本的考察

本文结合收入及健康、教育、生活状况、卫生状况和食物支出五个非收入指标,构建了“收入导向型”多维贫困指数,采用中国家庭追踪调查（CFPS）数据的农村子样本,考察多维贫困的识别、追踪和流动性问题。在比较了6维贫困指标和多维贫困指标对贫困识别的效果后研究发现,仅依据收入、教育和生活状况三个维度即可有效识别和追踪贫困家庭,并且在这三个维度下均处于贫困状态的农村家庭跳出贫困陷阱的概率显著低于一般收入贫困家庭。研究表明,扶贫政策应当在减少收入贫困基础上更多关注多重剥夺对贫困家庭整体福利的影响,并致力于提高贫困家庭的持续脱贫能力以增强其跳出贫困陷阱的可能性。     

How Should We Measure Poverty in a Changing World? Methodological Issues and Chinese Case Study

This study asks whether, in a rapidly changing world, the estimated proportion of the world's population with income below US$1 (adjusted according to purchasing power parity) per day is still a good measure of trends in poverty. It argues that strong economic growth in nations such as China implies that the commonly accepted international poverty line definition of one half median national equivalent income is increasingly relevant and that poverty intensity (the normalized deficit or Foster–Greer–Thorbecke (FGT) index of order one) is a better summary index. This index has a convenient graphical representation—the “poverty box”. Using the proposed poverty line and the example of ranking the level of rural poverty in Chinese provinces, the study demonstrates how poverty intensity replicates the poverty rankings of the Sen family of poverty indices and captures most of the information content of higher‐order FGT indices.     

Disentangling the Poverty Effects of Sectoral Output,Prices, and Policies in India

This paper attempts to disentangle the poverty effects of key policy variables that directly affect the poor (namely the government‐led channel of development spending and financing) in both agricultural and non‐agricultural sectors after accounting for the effect of respective sectoral per capita income and prices, using data from India over five decades. The paper emphasizes the sectoral composition of income and prices as mechanisms influencing the level of poverty and establishes empirically that it is the rise in non‐agricultural per capita income that reduces rural poverty via the channel of internal migration, after having controlled for the variation in key components of fiscal spending and monetary/financial policy via the availability of credit. Uneven sectoral growth pattern explains why urban poverty becomes a spill‐over of persistent rural poverty when the agricultural sector shrinks. While checking for robustness, there is evidence that the rise in non‐agricultural income alone may not reduce rural poverty, when measured in terms of rural infant mortality rate as a non‐income indicator of well‐being.     

Trade Liberalization and Spatial Inequality: a Methodological Innovation in a Vietnamese Perspective

The authors calibrate two static computable general‐equilibrium (CGE) models with 16 and 5999 representative households. Aggregated and disaggregated household categories are consistently embedded in a 2000 social accounting matrix (SAM) for Vietnam, mapping on a one‐to‐one basis. Distinct differences in poverty assessments emerge when the impact of trade liberalization is analyzed in the two models. This highlights the importance of modeling micro‐household behavior and related income and expenditure distributions endogenously within a static CGE model framework. The simulations indicate that poverty will rise following a revenue‐neutral lowering of trade taxes. This is interpreted as a worst‐case scenario, which suggests that the government should be proactive in combining trade liberalization measures with a pro‐poor fiscal response to avoid increasing poverty in the short to medium term.