Abstract
Poverty is a multidimensional concept. Besides income, it also includes many nonmonetary dimensions, such as education, health, housing, and access to public goods. Applying a nationally representative survey dataset, this study mainly investigates the role of China’s New Rural Pension Scheme (NRPS) in reducing multidimensional poverty among the rural elderly. We first select four dimensions of life quality, health, social inclusion, and subjective welfare to construct multidimensional poverty indicators. We then divide the sample into two parts by age (45–59 and above 60) and evaluate the poverty‐reduction effects of participating behaviors and receiving behavior separately. Moreover, we use the insured subsample to investigate the dynamic influence from insured status on received status. The results showed that, for the 45–59 age group, NRPS participation helped reduce poverty across the given indicators, especially in terms of health, life, and subjective welfare. For the elderly (over 60), receiving the pension effectively reduced poverty. In addition, we found that as age increases, pension income can effectively alleviate the insured subgroup’s multidimensional experience of poverty.
Highlights
At the end of 2020, China announced that it had completely eliminated absolute poverty, which was a great achievement in human history
Its main innovations are as follows: (1) in addition to considering traditional life quality and health dimensions, we considered social inclusion and subjective welfare, which reflect the living conditions of the elderly in their social networks of rural acquaintances. (2) e poverty-reduction effect of the New Rural Pension Scheme (NRPS) was decomposed into the poverty-reduction effects of participating behavior and receiving behaviors, and the effects for people aged 45–59 and those over 60 were examined separately
For social inclusion and subjective welfare, we mainly considered the problem of “rural hollowing” in the process of urbanization in China. e China Family Development Report of 2015 indicated that half of China’s elderly were “empty-nest,” while 10% lived alone (Source: National Health Commission of the People’s Republic of China). e emergence of rural hollowing has tended to reduce family sizes in rural China as younger gene rations move to the city, and the length of separation between parents and offspring has increased, leading to feelings of loneliness and helplessness among the elderly
Summary
At the end of 2020, China announced that it had completely eliminated absolute poverty, which was a great achievement in human history. Poverty exists in terms of living standards and mental and physical health Such poverty can include unclean drinking water, inadequate sanitation facilities, difficulties with housing, increased risk of illness, insufficient recreational activity and social participation, and dissatisfaction with life [5,6,7,8]. All of these are common in rural China, and according to Sen’s [9] theory of capability, they are all manifestations of poverty. Is study aims to investigate whether the NRPS has effectively solved the multidimensional poverty of the rural elderly.
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