Research on the roles that education plays in Chinese poverty alleviation

Abstract

Human capital investment is important for reduction in poverty. This paper – based on human capital theory, taking rural households in the Wuling Mountain Region as the samples, and adopting binary logistic regression – investigates the influences that education has on poverty alleviation in rural China. The results show that educational attainment plays a crucial role in poverty alleviation. For instance, 65.65% of illiterate or just literate people make less than 2300 yuan a year, while 48.76% of those with a primary education earn money at the same level. With a greater educational level, only 34.17% are at the poverty level. The results of logistic regression further support the argument. Our research suggests that policy-makers in China’s anti-poverty action should allocate more educational resources to the poor rural areas in order to further alleviate poverty in rural China.