Abstract
Agricultural cooperatives have been found to effectively alleviate poverty in developing countries because of their specific socioeconomic functions that allow poor households to overcome marketing and production constraints. However, cooperative evaluations are inevitably influenced by other poverty alleviation measures and rarely consider the characteristics of specific ethnic groups. Using cross-sectional surveys in Southwest China and employing propensity score matching (PSM) and endogenous switching regression (ESR) models, this paper analyzed the participation of poor households in New-type Agricultural Cooperatives (NACs) in ethnic areas and assessed the income impacts of NAC membership by eliminating unobserved biases and group heterogeneity. This study detected heterogeneous policy perceptions and behavioral differences between the member and nonmember groups, and the PSM and ESR model results indicated that, overall, participation in the NACs had a positive effect on household income. The ESR model was found to be more plausible as it was able to reveal the significant income gaps under a counterfactual inference framework. Local policymakers need to focus on the policy perception and behavioral and earning capability differences between groups and increase the balanced policy implementation.
Highlights
Poverty alleviation to narrow rural-urban gaps and eliminate poverty is a global challenge [1, 2]
The marginal effects of the main variables should be rather focused on [69, 70], and the results showed heterogeneous policy perception and behavioral differences between the groups [71, 72]
It was found that Tujia nationality households were more likely to be New-type Agricultural Cooperatives (NACs) members than Han and Miao nationality households. e number of migrant workers was found to be negatively related to NAC membership
Summary
Poverty alleviation to narrow rural-urban gaps and eliminate poverty is a global challenge [1, 2]. China has made outstanding contributions to global poverty alleviation since implementing its targeted poverty alleviation (TPA) strategy in 2013 [3]. Industrialized poverty alleviation (IPA) has been found to be an effective method for promoting sustainable development in poverty-stricken areas and households in developing countries [4]. Poor smallholders usually face constraints such as high transaction costs of accessing output markets, lack of modern agricultural technologies, and poor access to production services and credit services that hinder poor households participating in IPA and economically empower the rural poor [5–10]. In China, as in other developing countries such as Ethiopia, Kenya, and Rwanda, agricultural cooperatives are third sector organizations designed to overcome the constraints hindering poor households participating in IPA, economically empower the rural poor, and boost rural development [11–13]. If not taking possible selection biases into account, the deep-seated intragroup inequities and policy implementation deviations may still exist [17–19]
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