Human Capital Accumulation?Its Inequality And Anti-poverty In Rural China

The poverty has plagued the all-round development of rural economy for a long time,which continues to worsen due to the two main reasons of illness and learning.To break away from poverty,the way we improve the health and education to increase households income,in which is confirmed by many scholars.However,the impact of income changes caused by unequal human capital on rural poverty reduction is often overlooked.Based on the data of China health and Nutrition Survey(CHNS),this paper makes use of the Apouey inequality index and Mincer expansion model to study the human capital and its inequality from the dual perspective of income level and income gap on the impact of poverty alleviation in rural China.The results show that:(1)using Apouey(2007)method,we calculate health inequality index and education inequality index from the ordinal variables of health and education date.We found that the degree of health inequality index among households is increasing year by year and shows a consistent trend in each region;The degree of education inequality index is relatively serious,especially in the eastern region,but decreasing and alleviating in the trend of index size year by year.(2)The empirical results indicate that the improvements of health and education increase households income,and more importantly health has played a significant positive role in narrowing the income gap.But the poverty reduction effects are obviously suppressed by the impact of health inequality and education inequality.In addition,the two inequalities is a significant factor to widen the income gap between two types of households,which phenomenon is particularly prominent in the eastern region.The study concludes that continuing to promote human capital accumulation,especially in health improvement by investment,is a crucial mechanism to increase the income level of poor households and eliminate absolute poverty in rural areas;Also,we should pay attention to the strategic orientation of the human capital opportunity inequality,which is very key to narrowing the income gap between households and alleviating rural relative poverty.Finally,compared with the existing literature,there are some the contributions of this paper in the following:(1)In view of human capital inequality,we select self-rated health and education status as the basic variable dates and apply Apouey(2007)method to calculating the index of health inequality and education inequality,which is different from the traditional method of measurement.(2)Based on the two levels of income level and income gap,the poverty reduction effects are compared between the poor and the non-poor households in the whole or different regions by means of the fixed effect and the quantile regression method.(3)The use of different poverty line standards and different indicators of the model for a robust test.