RETRACTED: Improvement in the Poverty Status of Ecological Migrants under the Urban Resettlement Model: An Empirical Study in China

Abstract

As a major measure of ecological environment protection, ecological migration addresses the conflict between humans and the ecological environment. The Urban Resettlement Model is a prevalent resettlement model used by the Chinese government to try to alleviate poverty brought about by the ecological environment by promoting migration. This study initially explored the mechanism of influencing the livelihoods of relocated households in the Urban Resettlement Model by analyzing questionnaire data obtained from farmers in the resettlement area of Nangqian County. The coarsened exact matching (CEM) model was used to control the influence of confounding factors in the observation data. Next, a disordered multinomial logistic regression model was used to analyze the impact and effect of the Urban Resettlement Model on the livelihoods of the relocated non-agricultural farmers and poor relocated households. The results show that the Urban Resettlement Model has a significant promotion effect on the non-agricultural livelihoods of the relocated farmers. For all relocated households, the presence of medical facilities exhibited a significant promotion effect on the non-agricultural livelihoods of the relocated farmers. For poor relocated households, convenient transportation facilities facilitated the pursuit of non-agricultural livelihoods such as migrant work. However, industrial support, employment support, or training had no statistically significant effects on all relocated households or poor relocated households. The number of family laborers and communication costs were significant promoting influences for all relocated households and poor relocated households to engage in part-time and non-agricultural livelihoods. There was a certain impact of relocation time on livelihood choice for the relocated farmers, but there was no significant impact for poor relocated households. Based on these findings, the following suggestions are proposed. Supporting industries should be provided and industrial transformation and upgrading efforts should be strengthened during the application of the Urban Resettlement Model to create job opportunities for relocated people. Additionally, enhanced construction of basic infrastructure, including transportation, medical care, and communication systems is required. The results of this work should facilitate the effective improvement of administration of the ecological resettlement environmental protection policy system.