Analyzing Influencing Factors of Rural Poverty in Typical Poverty Areas of Hainan Province: A Case Study of Lingao County

Abstract

Rural poverty and poverty reduction are not only the focal issues that have attracted worldwide attention, but also the vital issues on people’s livelihood that has attached great importance and aimed to be solved by the central and local governments of China. Based on the survey data of 354 farming households, this paper, taking the national poverty county of Lingao County, Hainan Province for an example, examined the characteristics of rural poverty of the county. Moreover, this paper established the spatial lag model (SLM) from five dimensions, namely, status of the household head, household structure, health status, income composition and traffic accessibility, to analyze the main influencing factors of rural poverty according to the values of Moran’s I and the diagnosis of spatial dependence of the OLS model. It is found that the poor farming households gathered mainly in five towns in the north and southwest of the county, and the rural poverty have the characteristics of low educational level of the heads, more minor children, high population of farming peasants, high incidence of disease and low proportion of household wage-equivalent income. The results also showed that the variables such as the number of minor children, the number of migrant worker, the number of farming peasants and the proportion of wage-equivalent income have significant effectiveness on rural poverty, while the status of the household head, health status and traffic accessibility have little influence. It is an important way to realize the goal of poverty alleviation by controlling the number of farmers’ fertility, strengthening the vocational skills training of farmers, vigorously developing specialization and large-scale agriculture and increasing the employment opportunities of farmers.