Urban Poverty: Causes, Current Situation, and Relief

Author: Wu Biying
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-01-01
Features: Since the reform and opening-up, residents' income in China has grown rapidly. With the adjustment of the economic structure, income inequality among residents has been expanding, leading to the emergence of urban low-income groups. This poverty phenomenon that accompanies economic growth exists to varying degrees in both developed and developing countries. Therefore, research on urban poverty has become one of the hot topics on the global economics forum. Before 1990, China's urban poverty issue was not given enough attention, and the focus of "poverty alleviation and development" was on rural areas. After the 1990s, due to industrial restructuring, issues such as layoffs and unemployment became prominent, and the government began to take urban poverty seriously, while the economics community also started relevant research. In recent years, the Party and the government have attached great importance to the urban poverty issue, with top leaders holding special meetings multiple times to study and address the problem. Comrade Jiang Zemin once pointed out that caring about the living difficulties of laid-off workers and impoverished populations is a fundamental issue concerning public sentiment and the rise or fall of the regime. This book aims to conduct a more scientific and systematic study of the causes, history, current status, and relief of urban poverty in China in recent years. It adopts a combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods, emphasizing both the completeness and scientificity of theory while focusing on practical relevance and the application of quantitative methods. Income inequality is the main reason for poverty, and this book begins its research by examining the inequality in the income distribution of urban residents. Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 study the theory of income distribution and quantitative methods for researching income inequality. We conceptualize income distribution and income inequality theoretically, particularly elaborating on the mathematical representation of income distribution and the measurement indicators of income distribution gaps, in order to establish a solid theoretical foundation for the entire book. In Chapter 3, we apply the theories mentioned above and the established indicators for measuring income distribution gaps to conduct empirical research, analyzing the reasons for the widening income distribution gap among urban residents in China. In developed countries, income tax is a powerful tool for income redistribution and one of the tools for designing anti-poverty policies. In Chapters 4 and 5, we discuss progressive income tax. In Chapter 4, we prove that progressive income tax rates can reduce income inequality and verify, using actual data, that the progressive income tax in the UK indeed has a redistributive effect on income. However, China's personal income tax has not yet fulfilled its role in income redistribution. In Chapter 5, we explore the design of the personal income tax system. Chapter 6 discusses the methods for defining poverty, measuring poverty levels, and assessing the effectiveness of anti-poverty measures. Based on this, we conduct an empirical study on urban poverty: applying the poverty evaluation index to calculate the urban poverty index, using the generalized Lorentz curve to compare the poverty levels of four regions in Fujian Province, and employing factor analysis to compare and rank the poverty levels of all provinces and cities in China (Tibet and Taiwan are excluded from the statistics due to insufficient data). Chapter 7 studies the scale, characteristics, and trends of change in China's urban poor population. Chapter 8 is a report and analysis of typical investigations on urban poverty issues. Through household surveys, questionnaires, discussions, and individual interviews, we investigate and analyze the scale, characteristics, trends of change, and relief conditions of the impoverished population. Chapter 9 argues that the fundamental to eliminating poverty is focusing on human development, and the ultimate goal of poverty alleviation is to assist the poor in awakening or strengthening their awareness of escaping poverty and enabling them to regain the ability to increase their income opportunities. It proposes that in urban anti-poverty efforts, the advantages of urban education resources should be fully utilized to implement education-based poverty alleviation. Chapter 10 discusses urban anti-poverty from the perspective of human capital investment. Chapter 11 discusses urban anti-poverty from the perspective of unemployment insurance.