Abstract
Increasing the income of poor rural households is essential for the realization of China’s goal of sustainable development, which entails inclusive and equitable development and reducing the developmental gap between urban and rural areas. We conducted a case study of Wangqing County, a frontier minority area in Northeast China to examine spatial patterns and income differentials among poor rural households in this area. We quantified existing associations between household-level and environmental-level characteristics and income by applying hierarchical linear models. We subsequently applied Geographically Weighted Regression to analyze the spatial heterogeneity of the environmental-level variables and develop an understanding of the interaction mechanism of influencing factors. The results revealed that the distribution of villages, where income levels were similar, showed significant spatial agglomeration characteristics. Our findings also provide empirical evidence that household- and village-level characteristics together determine the income of poor households, but that household-level characteristics determine destitution to a greater extent than environmental characteristics. More specifically, the sex, health condition, and labor capacity of the household head, household size, the dependency ratio, social welfare, and off-farm work are significantly associated with household income. At the environmental level, arable land, the distance to the county center, and the average altitude had spatially heterogeneous impacts that varied in direction and intensity. This systematic study provides a more comprehensive and integrated understanding of the factors influencing the income of poor households in a frontier minority area in Northeast China.
Highlights
Poverty is a social phenomenon that poses a challenge in countries worldwide and especially in developing countries
To determine the patterns of similarity and dissimilarity in the distribution-based clustering of the village-level annual per capita net income of poor households (VPCIPs), we examined the Global Moran’s I, Local Moran’s I, and Local Indicators of Spatial Association (Lisa) cluster of the VPCIPs
Most household-level variables were significantly associated with the PCIPs
Summary
Poverty is a social phenomenon that poses a challenge in countries worldwide and especially in developing countries. Ese programs include a series of medium- and long-term projects, notably the Seven-Year Program for Lifting 80 Million People out of Poverty (1994–2000) and the Outlines for Development-Oriented Poverty Alleviation for China’s Rural Areas conducted in two phases from 2001 to 2010 and from 2011 to 2020. Rapid economic growth and urbanization have enabled China to make great strides toward reducing absolute poverty, resulting in its status as the first country in the world to achieve the United Nations goal of halving the proportion of the population living in poverty [2]. US dollars per person per day, more than 700 million poor people extricated themselves from poverty between 1978 and 2015, and the number of poor in rural China was dramatically reduced as a result of a steady increase in their income [3,4,5]. Poverty mostly arises because of low income, and many poor households can extricate themselves from poverty by improving their income [8]. erefore, it is important for governments, nongovernmental organizations, and multilateral institutions to know the precise reasons why longterm income remains low for households that continue to be poor, so that they can provide more targeted help to increase the income levels of poor households
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