The Impact Of Commercial Insurance On Poverty Vulnerability Of Rural Families In China

Targeted poverty alleviation is one of the three key battles for China to win a moderately prosperous society in all respects.By 2020,the poverty-stricken population in rural areas will be steadily lifted out of poverty under the current standard.However,the vast majority of rural families are weak in anti-risk ability.Once they are negatively impacted by major diseases and risk disasters,they may fall back into poverty again.Therefore,how to keep the achievements of poverty alleviation and alleviate the poverty vulnerability of rural families is a problem worthy of consideration in the post-poverty alleviation era.Commercial insurance is one of the important tools for risk management.It plays an important role in the poverty alleviation activities of rural families.At the same time,it also plays an important role in consolidating the achievements of poverty alleviation and preventing the poor rural families from returning to poverty again.But how to give full play to the role of commercial insurance in the practical application process,and through what paths? Answers to these questions have a certain theoretical and practical significance for poverty alleviation activities in rural area.This paper mainly takes the rural family as the research object,and carries out the research from three aspects.First,it analyzes the basic characteristics of rural family poverty vulnerable groups and finds out the key factors affecting the poverty vulnerability;second,it measures the level of rural family poverty vulnerability,which provides the corresponding reference for the government to formulate anti-poverty policies in the new period;third,it discusses the role of commercial insurance in the governance of rural families poverty vulnerability.We should make full use of the market mechanism to enhance the self-development ability and anti-risk ability of rural families.Based on this idea,the paper is divided into six parts:The first part is the introduction.This part mainly introduces the research background and significance,research methods and research ideas,etc.It focuses on the literature review on the family poverty vulnerability and commercial insurance to alleviate family poverty vulnerability.It points out the possible innovation and shortcomings of this paper.The second part is the theoretical analysis of commercial insurance to alleviate the poverty vulnerability of rural families in China.First of all,from the three links of the risk chain,namely,the occurrence of risk,the response to risk and the welfare loss caused by risk,it systematically studies the essential connotation,measurement criteria and measurement methods of poverty vulnerability;then,by combing the sustainable livelihood capital theory and risk impact theory,it is found that internal and external factors are the key to understand poverty vulnerability.The response function of court to external risk shock is the embodiment of family welfare at different time points.In the production and operation activities of rural families using their own livelihood capital,any link may face the negative impact of risk.Therefore,the risk management measures and the amount of self-owned capital will have an important impact on the vulnerability of family poverty.As an important means of risk management,commercial insurance can alleviate the vulnerability of family poverty by providing security,financing and credit enhancement functions.The third part investigates the current situation of poverty vulnerability of rural families in China.Through the analysis of the basic characteristics of rural poor families,it is found that the direct causes of poverty vulnerability of rural families lie in internal and external factors: the external causes are mainly the negative impact brought by external risks;the internal causes are that the accumulation of family livelihood capital is deficient,the risk management means are lacking,and the ability to resist risks is low.Then,based on the analysis framework of sustainable livelihood capital and the micro data provided by China Household Finance Survey(CHFS),with the help of the three-stage least square methods,this paper measures the poverty vulnerability of rural households.The results show that: first,under the three vulnerability lines,the poverty vulnerability of rural households has a downward trend year by year;second,from the prediction data of each year,the higher the poverty line standard,the higher the poverty vulnerability of rural families;third,compared with urban families,the poverty vulnerability of rural families is higher;fourth,with the rising of the standard of vulnerability line,the possibility of family returning to poverty is increasing.The fourth part combs the practical experience of China's commercial insurance in governance of rural family poverty vulnerability from the perspective of product type and operation mode.For the rural low-income families,the main risks of returning to poverty are: first,serious diseases;second,natural disasters;third,lack of agricultural materials.Insurance can alleviate the impact of these three factors on low-income families to a certain extent,prevent families from returning to poverty due to disasters and diseases by providing risk protection,and provide funding sources for them through direct capital injection or cooperation with other institutions.After years of exploration and development,insurance provides a variety of products and services that mainly include security and credit injection,to alleviate the poverty vulnerability of rural families.At the same time,according to the specific situation of rural areas in various regions,a variety of marketing channels and operation modes have been developed,such as commercialization,semi commercialization and multi-agent cooperation.The fifth part is an empirical study on the performance of China's commercial insurance in the governance of rural household poverty vulnerability.Based on the household micro data provided by CHFS database,the fixed effect model is used to test the impact of commercial insurance on the poverty vulnerability of rural families,and the impact of commercial life insurance,commercial health insurance and other commercial insurance on the poverty vulnerability of rural families.The following conclusions are drawn: first,commercial insurance can reduce the poverty vulnerability of rural families,and the empirical results show that from 2011 to 2017,the average vulnerability rate decreased year by year,and the average vulnerability rate of families who had purchased commercial insurance also decreased year by year at a fast speed and a large degree.The vulnerability of families with commercial insurance was generally lower than that of families without commercial insurance.Second,commercial health insurance can most effectively alleviate the poverty vulnerability of rural households.Third,raising the poverty line and vulnerability line can increase the marginal effect of commercial health insurance.The sixth is to use commercial insurance to alleviate the poverty vulnerability of rural families in China.According to the conclusion of theoretical research,practical analysis and empirical research: the development of commercial insurance can effectively alleviate the poverty vulnerability of rural families.This paper puts forward two aspects of institutional design and rural commercial insurance development to use commercial insurance to alleviate the poverty vulnerability of rural families in China.The innovation of this paper is mainly in the following three aspects:1.Innovation of topic selection angle.The research literature on how to alleviate the poverty vulnerability of rural families is mostly concentrated in the fields of micro loans and social insurance,while the comprehensive research on commercial insurance to alleviate the poverty vulnerability of rural families is relatively scarce.2.Introduction of the theory of sustainable livelihood capital to establish poverty vulnerability index system.Based on the theory of sustainable livelihood capital,this paper constructs a poverty vulnerability index from the livelihood capital of rural families to measure the families' anti risk ability,and then estimates the possibility of falling into poverty in the future.3.Putting forward the solution to alleviate the poverty vulnerability of rural families through the development of rural commercial insurance.The governance of rural family poverty vulnerability is an extremely complex problem,which needs the joint efforts of multiple channels,multiple directions and multiple players.Actively developing commercial insurance and making full use of social forces are conducive to reducing the cost of government poverty alleviation,promoting the transformation of government functions,further improving the multi-level risk guarantee system in rural areas,and establishing and perfecting the long-term mechanism of poverty alleviation without returning to poverty.In this paper,there are the following deficiencies.First,due to the limited availability of data,the study of rural household poverty vulnerability needs to be further expanded.For example,because of the lack of continuous data of different models of rural commercial insurance to alleviate family poverty vulnerability,we can not do empirical analysis,and can only do general comparative analysis;when exploring the impact of commercial insurance on rural family poverty vulnerability,the data used is from CHFS,but as of 2019,only four rounds of survey data are available,and therefore the reliability of the conclusions needs to be further verified.Second,the relationship between rural commercial insurance and existing policy insurance needs to be further studied.These will be the main directions of my continuous research on this issue in the future.