Rural Poverty, Growth, and Inequality in China

This book aims to empirically and theoretically study how the economic growth and inequality affected China’s rural poverty since China’s reform and opening-up. Apart from the trickle-down effect, some empirical researches show that rising inequality usually links with unfairly shared of the economic growth, which is not good for the poor, and this book particularly concerns with the impact of inequality on poverty reduction. In 11 chapters, it leads readers to review the dynamic changes of rural poverty in China, and estimates rural poverty by various methods, for instance, with analysis by monetary poverty (including income and expenditure poverty), multidimensional poverty, absolute poverty, and relative poverty. Especially attention is paid to apply the “growth-inequality-poverty triangle” model for long-term poverty dynamic changes evaluation. The book revisits poverty reduction strategies in different development periods for rural China and evaluates the poverty eradication achievements stage-by-stage under different analytical methods, in order to provide an objective assessment. Among the chapters, pro-poor growth, Shapley decomposition, poverty elasticity, density estimation, multidimensional poverty analysis, and policy simulation methods are applied for both national wide discussion and rural sub-group heterogeneity analysis. In addition to students, teachers, and researchers in the areas of development, economic growth, equity, and welfare, the book is also of great interest to policy makers, planners, and non‐government agencies who are concerned with understanding and addressing poverty-related issues in the developing countries.

Yangyang Shen is Associate Professor of Economics at the School of Economics and Resource Management, Beijing Normal University. She holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Nankai University. She was Postdoc at Business School of Beijing Normal University and Research Officer at Oxford Poverty and Human Initiative (OPHI), University of Oxford. Her research interests include development economics, welfare economics, income inequality, and poverty. Recently, her research work focuses on China’s poverty reduction policy evaluation and multidimensional poverty dynamic evolutions. She has co-authored three books and published journal at China & World Economy, Public Health, and over 30 Chinese academic journals.