Dynamic Analysis Of The Urban Poor And Countermeasures Research

During China's reforms for more than two decades, the Chinese society has gone through significant changes. Urban poverty as a result has been rapidly growing and is now an issue of national magnitude. Poverty inevitably causes serious social problems such as disrupting social equality and breaking social stability. The issue of poverty has drawn the attention of the whole Chinese society. Naturally, it has been on the top of the agendas of both the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese government which has undertaken the task of establishing an effective system to alleviate poverty. As a part of the government poverty-alleviation strategy, protection for a minimum-income urban resident as a policy has been enacted and has provided "protection for everyone eligible." At the same time, in better-development regions, the local governments have made efforts to provide poor families with medical care or low-rent apartments. Some have also managed to collect no or less tuition for children from impoverished families.It is certain that these policies have contributed to the alleviation of urban poverty. However, one must not ignore the fact that there are still large rooms for improvement in the present government policies. In the first place, the policies are designed to "repair the damages", for although in theory everyone eligible has protection, absolute poverty is far from being eliminated. For those who are at high risk of poverty (the relatively poor), the policies provide little effective prevention. Secondly, the present policies are passive and the protection provides are insufficient. The impoverished families can hardly rely on the policies to get out of the poverty. That is to say, we cannot trust the policies to eradicate urban poverty. It is therefore highly necessary to look for new ways and finally to establish new and effective systems to combat urban poverty.For this end, we, above all, need to investigate into urban poverty in China: how it happens, how it develops, and what causes the poverty. In the past, researchers in this field have done a lot and have made good achievements. They have watched the poor and have done investigations into their life. However, the past researches are generally unsatisfactory for their limited scope and depths. The researches are usually confined to certain periods of time and have not followed continuously the life of the poor in question. Or, they have collected data of different times, but the information is more often than not patchy and unsystematic. All these in deed prevent us from deep insights into the causes and developments of urban poverty. As for the assessment of the past policies, researchers have invariably paid their attention only to the results of the poverty-alleviation policies. The current policies of social protection have been effective for more than ten years, during which time the society has changed significantly. There does not seem to be clear understanding of how the policies affect and change the life of the poor, of what effects the policies have achieved in various stages of application, and of how they fail to suit the concrete situations , etc. After participation in some unbroken studies of the urban poor families, the present author attempts to answer all these questions and assumes that the answers are preliminaries to the successful solutions to urban poverty.The first chapter of the present dissertation lists the reason and states the significance of the research and describes the structure of the dissertation.The second chapter reviews of the economic theories on the problem of poverty and classifies them into different braches in economics.The third chapter makes a review of the metamorphosis of China's urban minimum-income family welfare policy. With a conclusion of the realistic social problems, the present author points out that China's current anti-poverty policy aims to the ensure the lowest living standard of the absolute impoverished population while gives insufficient consideration to the adjustment of the distribution of their family income. Therefore, the current policies are ineffective in helping the poor population to get rid of poverty. This is actually the main argument of this dissertation.The fourth chapter begins with defining urban poverty. The present author assumes that we should give full consideration to the comparativeness of city poverty and its side-effects, and, comparative poverty should be heeded in order to have a full understanding of the poverty situation in Chinese cities.The fifth chapter depicts the social stratification of Shanghai residents and their income composition through the analysis of the statistical data from government and sampling data of our department. Based on this depiction, further analysis of families' income and consumption in middle-low social class is carried out.In the sixth chapter, the present author, who has participated in a continuous research on the impoverished families in Shanghai's Pudong New Area, makes an analysis on such economic indexes as income, expenditure, medical expenditure and housing expenditure of these families and makes a specific description of their poverty situations. This chapter also examines the reasons of urban poverty and ventures to provide an evaluation of the current anti-poverty policies in Shanghai.In the seventh chapter, this dissertation, in the light of welfare economic theories and on the basis of the conclusions in the fifth chapter, makes the statement that there lays some deficiencies in the social welfare system and the anti-poverty system. Further, this chapter raises some specific suggestions on the improvement of social welfare system.The original ideas of this dissertation are as follows:1. In order to collect some first-hand information on how the bottom-line welfare policy influences the expenditure of the minimum-income families; the present author makes the paired samples T test~1 on their expenditures on food and on others (water, electricity, fuel, communication, transportation, entertainment, community service, health subsidies and dinner-out). The finding is that the pricing rigidity increase (or income increase) have a remarkable effect on the expenditure changes in the low-income families. The minute changes in the bottom-line welfare policy has little effect on the expenditure above. Therefore, it can be concluded that the current welfare policy in reality falls short of its goals.2. A test on "the threshold effect"To test the effect of the threshold effect of governmental policy, the present author makes a comparison between the minimum-income security family and the opposite. The result proves that they have a remarkable difference in salary income and pension income while little in part-time job income. The conclusion here is that the threshold effect is not always reliable in the sense of statistics.3. By testing of effects of illnesses upon families, this dissertation finds out that the living conditions in comparatively poor families with a patient is no higher than that of absolutely poor families. It shows that medical expenditures weigh a lot in the living conditions. As is emphasized in the chapters above, the comparatively poor population should also be admitted into the anti-poverty welfare system.4. The educational fee has a strong effect on the low-income security family. This dissertation shows that increases in the educational fee will decrease some non-necessity expenditures (transportation, communication and entertainment), while, other necessity expenditures (food, community service) are not be affected.5. An investigation into the causes of poverty following the Logistic model Although it is convenient to adopt the minimum-income security policy by the measure of average income per capital, it does result in some deviations. The present author ventures to substitute self-hold income5 for the average income per capital. In this sense, the scope of comparative poverty population and the absolute poverty population will be considerably modified. The conclusion in this situation is: in the absolute poverty family, when the medical fees and debts weigh more in their life, the chances to increase the family income are slimmer and more unemployment are; in the comparative poverty family, the situation, though a little better than the absolute poverty families, is also much harder than the regular families. For both the absolute and comparative poverty families, the educational fee is a great burden.