中国农村扶贫模式研究的进展与框架

中国农村扶贫模式是在多年扶贫实践过程中产生的,得到了国际社会的广泛认可。研究扶贫模式是总结中国农村几十年扶贫实践恰当的切入点,在理论和实践上都很有意义。本文系统总结了扶贫模式研究的进展,并尝试从规范经济学角度提出了扶贫模式研究的新框架。     

Layoffs and Urban Poverty in the State-Owned Enterprise Communities in Shaanxi Province,China

This paper applies a mixed methods approach that combines qualitative and quantitative methods to examine urban poverty in China’s state-owned enterprise communities where laid-off workers concentrate. A sequential explanatory model using interviews, Participatory Poverty Assessments and a community household survey on textile and military industries in Shaanxi Province of north-western China shows that low-income households suffered multidimensional disadvantages. Qualitative techniques have helped to reveal the hidden aspects of poverty while statistical tools have captured holistic information on the communities. These approaches together (Q-squared) consider both the outsiders’ and insiders’ views on the laid-off poor and benefit the making of effective anti-poverty policies.     

Dimensionality of the Chinese Perceived Causes of Poverty Scale: Findings Based on Confirmatory Factor Analyses

The Chinese Perceived Causes of Poverty Scale (CPCPS) was constructed to assess Chinese people’s beliefs about poverty. Four categories of explanations of poverty are covered in this scale: personal problems of poor people, lack of opportunities to escape from poverty, exploitation of poor people, and bad fate. Based on the responses of 1,519 Chinese secondary school students to the CPCPS, confirmatory factor analyses provided support for these four dimensions of the scale. By splitting the total sample into two sub-samples, further analyses showed that the CPCPS was invariant with reference to factor structure (configural invariance), factor loadings (construct-level metric covariance) and factor variances/covariances across different samples. The present findings are generally consistent with the previous findings based on exploratory factor analyses and they provide support for the use of the CPCPS for assessing beliefs about causes of poverty in Chinese people. The preparation for this work was financially supported by Wofoo Foundation.     

When Twenty-Four Hours is not Enough: Time Poverty of Working Parents

Individuals can be money poor, time poor or both. While income is the most used indicator of poverty, broader indexes including non-monetary aspects of deprivation have been proposed and measured. As one such measure, our study focuses on the element of deprivation arising from the time deficit of many working people. The usual poverty threshold is calculated as the amount of income to buy the minimum required goods and services from the market. This minimum required purchase is greater for these people since they have less time than the average person to produce some goods and services for themselves at home. So, they need money to buy these in the market in order to maintain the same consumption. The income standard must be supplemented to adequately measure actual poverty. Time use data make it possible to establish time requirements and time availability and provide a measure of time poverty. Using Canadian GSS 1998 data, and building on the work of Vickery (1977, ‚The time poor: A new look at poverty’, The Journal of Human Resources 12(1), pp. 27-48) and of Douthitt (1993, ‚The inclusion of time availability in Canadian poverty measures’, Time-Use Methodology: Toward Consensus (ISTAT, Roma), pp. 83–91), and our own previous study, we estimate time-adjusted poverty thresholds and rates for single and dual parent Canadian families. As expected, we have found high incidence of time deficit among the employed single parents with children. We make a case for the acceptance of a redefined poverty standard for such time-deprived groups.     

The Capability Approach and Fuzzy Poverty Measures: An Application to the South African Context

One way of making the capability approach (CA) operational uses fuzzy poverty measures. In this paper, we present a new approach to applying these measures in the South African context using responses to a questionnaire on ‘The Essentials of Life’ in conjunction with a methodology for dealing with the vagueness of poverty. Our results suggest very low cut-offs for people or households to classify as definitely poor for some social indicators. These cut-offs are far lower than those Klasen used in his application of the CA. The attempt to apply the CA using Cheli and Lemmi’s ‘totally fuzzy and relative’ poverty measure in conjunction with our approach to specifying cut-offs can lead to incoherence. This measure can, nonetheless, be useful when social indicators have a ‘relativist component’. While the Cerioli and Zani measure does not lead to such incoherence, it also has a serious weakness.     

Subjective Quantitative Studies of Human Agency

Amartya Sen’s writings have articulated the importance of human agency, and identified the need for information on agency freedom to inform our evaluation of social arrangements. Many approaches to poverty reduction stress the need for empowerment. This paper reviews subjective quantitative measures of human agency at the individual level. It introduces large-scale cross-cultural psychological studies of self-direction, of autonomy, of self-efficacy, and of self-determination. Such studies and approaches have largely developed along an independent academic path from economic development and poverty reduction literature, yet may be quite significant in crafting appropriate indicators of individual empowerment or human agency. The purpose of this paper is to note avenues of collaborative enquiry that might be fruitful to develop. We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another, unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The Diary of Anais Nin, 1944–1947.     

经济转轨以前俄罗斯人口贫困状况及原因

人口贫困是一个内涵十分广泛和深刻的社会历史范畴,究其实质而言,这是一种能力贫困。中国和俄罗斯等转轨国家在改革前存在许多共同的特征,更为重要的是,社会主义制度不是建立在高度发达的资本主义社会基础之上,这就注定了贫困与反贫困问题必然要成为这些国家面临的共同课题。所不同的是,苏联和当代俄罗斯的人口贫困主要表现为收入贫困,中国则主要是知识贫困。苏联时期人口贫困的主要原因有经济绩效的递减趋势、国家经济发展战略的错误、所有制结构的单一、收入分配机制中的平均主义。     

A Sociodemographic Risk Index

In this paper, we conceptualize and develop an index of sociodemographic risk that we hypothesize will be an improvement over the standard poverty measure as a measure of risk for children’s development. The poverty line is widely used in government statistics and in research but is also widely acknowledged to have multiple shortcomings. Using recent data from the National Survey of America’s Families, we develop and examine a Sociodemographic Risk Index for two potential purposes: (a) to serve as a summary indicator of children’s environments that affect their well-being, and (b) to serve as a variable that can be used to identify at-risk subgroups of children whose well-being should be examined separately in indicator reports. Based on substantial research on children’s development, we chose five variables for the index: family income, family structure, parent education, family size, and home ownership. An additive sociodemographic risk index using these variables is strongly associated with multiple measures of child well-being in both bivariate and multivariate analyses. Hence, it serves as a good marker of risk for children and therefore as an indicator that could be monitored over time, across groups, and across places, as well as a variable that could be used to identify subgroups of at-risk children whose well-being should be monitored. However, analyses do not indicate that it performs better at identifying at-risk children than the current poverty measure. Therefore, we recommend the Sociodemographic Risk Index primarily as an additional summary indicator to be monitored, rather than as a replacement for the poverty measure.     

Wellbeing Research in Developing Countries: Reviewing the Role of Qualitative Methods

The authors review the contribution of qualitative methods to exploring concepts and experiences of wellbeing among children and adults living in developing countries. They provide examples illustrating the potential of these methods for gaining a holistic and contextual understanding of people’s perceptions and experiences. Some of these come from Young Lives, an innovative long-term international research project investigating the changing nature of child poverty in India, Ethiopia, Peru and Vietnam (), and others from the Wellbeing in Developing Countries ESRC research group (WeD), an international, inter-disciplinary project exploring the social and cultural construction of wellbeing in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Peru and Thailand (). The authors show how qualitative methods can be used both alongside and as part of the development of sensitive and relevant quantitative measures, and provide some practical and methodological recommendations. They propose that qualitative approaches are essential in understanding people’s experiences of wellbeing, both now and in the future. However, the authors caution that while these offer many benefits, for example, a less structured and hierarchical engagement between researcher and participant; they require time, energy, and sensitivity. Qualitative methods also work best when used by trained and experienced researchers working in the local language/s in a community where some rapport has already been established. Finally, the paper recommends combining data from qualitative and quantitative approaches (e.g. psychological measures or household surveys) to enhance its explanatory power.

Predicting Consumption Poverty using Non-Consumption Indicators: Experiments using Indonesian Data

Household consumption expenditure data is crucial for calculating important welfare measures such as poverty headcount rate. However, collecting such data is difficult and cumbersome. As an alternative, we experiment with three methods – consumption correlates model, poverty probability model, and wealth index principal components analysis (PCA) – to predict consumption expenditure and poverty using non-consumption indicators. The purpose is to use these alternatives for rapid monitoring and appraisal of social welfare as an early warning system. We test each method’s performance and find that the consumption correlates model is the best method to predict poverty quickly and relatively accurately. We find that education level, asset ownership, and consumption pattern are the best predictors of expenditure and poverty.     

Measuring and understanding the well-being of South Africans: Everyday quality of life in South Africa

South Africa has a Gini co-efficient of 62, one of the world’s highest (Finmark: Project FinScope 2004 and 2005, FinMark Trust, Johannesburg). Hence, measures of wealth are ubiquitous social indicators in South Africa. However, a growing emphasis in government towards measurable service delivery targets and remedial action to redress the inequalities of our past makes the reliable measurement of people’s quality of life in greater depth in quantitative terms an imperative.We have developed a simple framework to measure people’s quality of life in key domains that extend beyond that simply of wealth, using composite indices to allow progress to be tracked and to make valid comparisons across our diverse population. Termed the Everyday Quality of Life Index (EQLi), it comprises a suite of measures encompassing socio-economic status (with special reference to poverty), urbanisation, health (nutrition, exercise and fitness), stress/pressure, quality of the environment, satisfaction of human needs, connectivity, optimism, subjective well-being (happiness, after Diener and Lucas: 2000, in M. Lewis, J.M. Haviland (eds.), Handbook of Emotions. (2nd ed) (Guilford, New York)), and the overall measure of well-being, the EQLi itself.The initial framework was developed from a structured questionnaire administered to a probability sample of 2000 South African adults in 2002. From this, a 52-item shortlist was derived to create the series of measures. This has been tested and refined in three subsequent annual studies, each of 3500 people across urban and rural South Africa. In 2004, items involving work as well as determining the balance of skills and challenges at work using the concept of “flow” (Csikszentmihalyi: 1990, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Harper and Row, New York)) were added.This paper outlines the rationale behind the selection and development of these measures, describes the EQL of South Africans using these and other key measures and concludes with implications for policy-makers and service providers in South Africa. Some marketing implications are also given: there is a growing emphasis worldwide on corporate social investment initiatives and, particularly in South Africa, on community upliftment and development – poverty alleviation and improving the lives of the disadvantaged (“people” rather than “consumers”). Further, people’s well-being affects how they react to marketing activities.     

富裕农村社区的贫困问题研究

贫困问题已经越来越成为中国社会发展所面临的一个突出问题,并引起人们的广泛关注。但是,富裕农村社区贫困问题研究往往容易被忽视。从贫困负面影响而言,富裕社区的贫困问题,对社会所构成的负面影响和压力更大。本文利用苏南农村调查资料,探讨了富裕农村社区贫困问题,包括测量标准和家庭特征两方面内容。     

老年社会贫困影响因素的定量和定性分析

中国的社会转型和家庭变迁一方面对传统家庭的养老功能提出挑战,另一方面,由于社会养老制度的缺失或不完善,也由于家庭中老年人口比例的增加,老人对家庭养老的需求依旧十分强烈。利用定量和定性数据,探讨在家庭变迁和公共福利不足背景下老年社会贫困(衡量为健康欠佳、精神慰藉不足)的发生率和发生概率。模型分析结果显示,公共福利的有无、家庭形式和居住安排、子女数量和性别、子女的经济支持都作用于自评的健康水平和精神慰藉。因此,改善公共支持及服务体系、且将公共福利真正落到实处将有助于提高老人的社会福利。     

新疆城镇贫困及反贫困研究

新疆目前的贫困是农村地区的贫困。随着改革开放事业的逐步深入,新疆城镇出现了大量的贫困群体,他们对新疆的社会稳定和经济发展的影响比较大,其消极影响不能忽视。造成新疆城镇贫困的主要原因是就业不足、市场机制不完善和城镇社会保障制度不健全等。为解决城镇贫困问题,我们必须以人为本,扩大就业,逐步完善社会保障制度,政策上采取各种优惠措施,尽量保证城镇贫困群体的根本利益。     

Childhood and Capability Deprivation in Germany: A Quantitative Analysis Using German Socio-Economic Panel Data

Child poverty has been widely discussed in Germany since the publication of the third official Poverty and Wealth Report of the German government in 2008 which—inter alia—focused on the situation of children and families. However, child poverty is not only caused by low household incomes and impacts of child poverty are not only restricted to financial consequences. The capability approach takes into account this multidimensionality of well-being and poverty of children. It conceptualizes human well-being as not only depending on financial means but also gives the same importance to the personal and social conversion factors which determine how far financial means can be converted into personal well-being. Before 2008 the capability approach had only been applied to the well-being of adults in Germany, but not specifically to the well-being of children. However, there are several reasons why a capability analysis for children will differ from a capability analysis for adults. Adults’ capability sets comprise dimensions that are less relevant for small children while other valuable capabilities have to be added. Furthermore the capability set depends to a large extent on the age of the child. The paper focuses on a multidimensional poverty analysis in the capability perspective of 5–6 years old children. In the domains of “Education/Leisure”, “Health”, “Social Participation” and “Income” child poverty is measured by predefined indicators. The relationship to the social and personal conversion factors of the caretakers is then evaluated. Additionally, a multidimensional poverty measure is analyzed.     

Monitoring Urban Quality of Life: The Porto Experience

This paper describes the monitorin g system of the urban quality of life developed by the Porto City Council, a new tool being used to support urban planning and management. The two components of this system – a quantitative approach based on statistical indicators and a qualitative analysis based on the citizens’ perceptions of the conditions of life – are presented. The strengths and weaknesses of these two approaches adopted in the project are reviewed. It is argued that, in order to achieve a deeper understanding and more effective measurement of urban quality of life, both kinds of measurements are useful and complement each other.     

Subjective Well-Being,Poverty and Ethnicity in South Africa: Insights from an Exploratory Analysis

South Africa has one of the highest inequality levels in the world. In 1993, nearly half of the population were considered poor. These poverty and inequality levels were and still are a legacy of South Africa’s colonial and apartheid past. Since the end of apartheid, there has been a strong governmental effort to combat poverty and in this light a ‘social indicators movement’ has emerged. The aim of this article is to contribute to the South African social indicators research in three ways: Firstly, this article introduces ethnicity as a unit of analysis in the context of poverty and well-being. It is argued that racial categorisations are not justifiable and in the case of South Africa hide valuable insights. The results of an exploratory analysis suggest that ethnicity allows a more insightful analysis of poverty and well-being than race. Secondly, this article introduces a multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) in the context of subjective well-being research. Many studies regarding subjective well-being in South Africa use ordered probit regression models. It is argued here that these models are based on false assumptions and that a MCA can be seen as a suitable alternative since it constitutes an assumption free model. Lastly, the insights gained from the exploratory analysis are discussed. The MCA seems to show that subjective well-being can be regarded as an outcome measure. Furthermore, it is argued that there are cultural differences (between the ethnic groups) regarding subjective well-being. It seems that the ethnic groups in South Africa have different conceptions of well-being and that different factors influence their subjective well-being assessments. This work is partly based on a Master thesis from 2004 at the Institute for Development Policy and Management at the University of Manchester. I am grateful for the intellectual guidance, the constant support and encouragement by Wendy Olsen and for the comments on earlier drafts from Peter Edward, David A. Clark and two anonymous reviewers.     

On a ‘Level-Sensitive’ Headcount Ratio: Revisiting Shorrocks’ Poverty Index

It is often argued that indicators of achievement or deprivation should be measured such that they display a property of ‘level-sensitivity’, whereby a given change in the indicator acquires a greater significance the higher (lower) the level of achievement (deprivation) at which the change occurs. In this note, it is shown that a level-sensitive headcount ratio of poverty can be derived from an application of the very useful graphical device called ‘a deprivation profile’ advanced by Anthony Shorrocks (in: Jenkins et al. (eds.) The Distribution of Welfare and Household Production: International Perspectives, 1996).     

Composite Indices of Development and Poverty: An Application to MDGs

The measurement of development or poverty as multidimensional phenomena is very difficult because there are several theoretical, methodological and empirical problems involved. The literature of composite indicators offers a wide variety of aggregation methods, all with their pros and cons. In this paper, we propose a new, alternative composite index denoted as MPI (Mazziotta-Pareto Index) which, starting from a linear aggregation, introduces penalties for the countries or geographical areas with ‘unbalanced’ values of the indicators. As an example of application of the MPI, we consider a set of indicators in order to measure the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and we present a comparison between HDI (Human Development Index) methodology, HPI (Human Poverty Index) methodology and MPI.     

Subjective Wellbeing and its Meaning for Young People in a Rural Australian Center

In Australia, wellbeing has been used as an assessment of how young people are doing by health researchers, youth researchers and psychologists. The concept ‚wellbeing’ is increasingly applied to young people in their late teens and early twenties with little discussion of young people’s perspectives. Using quantitative measures of subjective wellbeing as well as qualitative interviews to allow young people to discuss the concept of wellbeing, this study explored the levels and meanings of wellbeing among 91 young people (aged 16–24) from a rural center in south-east Australia. Key components of wellbeing for young people were found to include relationships, psychological dimensions and personal issues while family and ‚pressure’ impacted wellbeing. For most young people, wellbeing was multidimensional, holistic and centred around their own lives. Findings suggest that the Deiner et al. satisfaction with life scale was an appropriate measure of young people’s wellbeing but that health, sociology of youth and psychological approaches all contribute to young people’s perspectives of wellbeing and need to be incorporated into a more holistic measure of SWB for young people.