The Key to Precise Poverty Alleviation Rests in the Precise Indentification of Impoverished Populations—An Analysis of the Targeting Effectiveness of China’s Rural Dibao Program

The success of the poverty elimination program, as an important element in the strategy of building a moderately prosperous society in all respects by 2020, depends on the accurate identification of the population living in poverty. An analysis of 2013 data from the China Household Income Project (CHIP 2013) shows that in terms of the income-based poverty line, the targeting of the current rural minimum living standard guarantee or subsistence allowance program (dibao) program is very imprecise; it improves with the use of multidimensional poverty criteria, but coverage remains poor. In order to unify the criteria for the rural poverty alleviation (fupin) criteria and the dibao criteria, a uniform set of national criteria should be established. This should shift from income as the sole criterion to multidimensional criteria, so that a uniform scheme can be developed to identify those in need. At the same time, the coverage of the dibao program should be extended and the transfer amounts increased, so that the scheme genuinely covers all of the target population in rural China.