The Evaluation Of Participatory Poverty Reduction Performance In Continuous Destitute Areas

Poverty is a constantly evolving concept. Following the view of relativepoverty, poverty is inevitable phenomenon that could happen in any stage of socialdevelopment with any social system. So it is necessary and imperative for us to faceup this problem and take positive and effective measures to alleviate the incidence ofpoverty and the extent of poverty.No matter whether it is viewed from outward manifestation or internal causes,poverty is multidimensional which is often related to politics, economy, culture,education and other aspects. In fact, poverty is not only the outward manifestation ofthe low level of income and consumption, but deprivation of intrinsic ability.Therefore, starting from the ultimated causes, the key to solve the problem ofpoverty is to cultivate the ability of the poor. Our country, being what it is, hasformed special situation in continuous destitute areas. The previous mode of povertyalleviation is not suitable for the new situation. Considering all of this, it’s inevitableand necessary to propose and implement participatory poverty alleviation mode.However, despite the participatory poverty reduction mode in response to theview of current mainstream about poverty and anti-poverty, the effect in specificpractice is not satisfactory. There are some urgent realistic issues to be solved, suchas low fund-utility efficiency, poor poverty alleviation aiming accuracy, poorparticipation of the poor and so on. It is the fundamental starting point of this thesisto evaluate the operational performance of participatory poverty reduction mode incontinuous destitute areas, to explore its problems and then propose effectivesolutions.Therefore, based on the basic theory and method of the DEA, we establish twointerrelated index system, one of which is a multi-dimensional poverty measurementindex system, and the second is a participatory poverty reduction performanceevaluation index system. They have the same frame of DEA evaluation model, andboth of them can be used to measure anti-poverty performance. Multi-dimensionalpoverty measurement index system covers multiple dimensions, such asdevelopment of economic, health care, the quality of the population, livingenvironment. And at the same time, we employ the DEA method to determine theweight and to reflect the state of poverty by DEA output efficiency indicators, aiming to measure the welfare state of the object in multiple criterions. By means ofstandard the DEA input-output framework in which the breadth and strength of theparticipatory poverty reduction mode are quantified, participatory poverty reductionperformance evaluation index system can measure its impacts on the incidence ofpoverty and the extent of poverty and then complete the relative efficiencyevaluation of specific poverty alleviation measures. The difference is obviousbetween the two index systems. The former indirectly evaluates the efficiency ofpoverty alleviation measures by measuring poverty, while the later directly evaluatethe anti-poverty efficiency of poverty alleviation measures.Furthermore, taking advantage of the established poverty measurement indexsystem, we evaluate the states of poverty in88county units of Guizhou provinceand point out the poor clustering phenomenon existed in66county units in thecontiguous poor areas. Based on the consequence, we examine these causes whichlead to poverty in county units of Guizhou province such as the economic growth,the attribute of county administrative unit and autonomous county, urbanizationprocess and other factors.And then we evaluate representative continuous destituteareas through participatory poverty reduction mode operational performance in anindirect way. The empirical results show that the level of urbanization cansignificantly explain the participatory poverty reduction performance.Finally, taking the characteristics of poverty in continuous destitute areas andthe conclusion from the empirical analysis into account, we propose a number ofpolicy recommendations to enhance the participatory poverty reduction performance,to alleviate the extent of poverty and the incidence of poverty in continuous destituteareas, It mainly involves strengthening the poverty alleviation fund management,optimizing the evaluation index system of objective performance, strengthening thecoordination and cooperation between the areas, carrying out participatory povertyalleviation projects according to local conditions, strengthening the destitute areas ofinfrastructure construction, paying more attention to human resource development incontinuous destitute areas, and speeding up the process of urbanization, and so on.