Quantitative Analysis On Effect Of Government's Anti-poverty Policy From Social Capital Perspective

Poverty is one kind of social phenomenon, at the same time one kind of economic phenomenon as well. Its existence is an obstacle in front of the development of human being. Since China has put reform and opening-up policy into practice on, the rapid development of economy has brought a significant improvement in absolute poverty. However, in the mean time, running of market economy has exacerbated the situation of income inequality, and the rising price of real estate, medical treatment and consumption has also put a lot of pressure on the survival of low income families. In other words, economic growth brought by reform and opening-up strengthens relative poverty problem to a certain degree. From this perspective, one could say that the changing poverty phenomena in China are in accordance with the changing institution process. Therefore, government ought to play a leading role in the poverty reduction process.Reviewing the poverty reduction process in China, government indeed has been playing a crucial part. Yet if we take a look at China's anti-poverty policies in the past, it is easy to notice that most of anti-poverty policies aim at building physical capital or human capital. Policies aiming at building social capital are rather rare. Even if there were a few, they were mostly unconscious. However, developing social capital theory indicates us that social capital can be of great help in reducing poverty. In this context, it appears rather important to analyze effects of anti-poverty policies from a social capital perspective.By analyzing the philosophy of how anti-poverty polices work, the author finds out that the mechanism of any anti-poverty policy is to strengthen poor families'capital construction in order to improve their income. Furthermore, the author discovers that anti-poverty polices affect household production not only directly though the capital channel that it aims at building, but also indirectly via another capital channels that it does not specially aim at building. With this knowledge, the author works out the pathway of policy effect and focuses on figure out the mechanism of how policies work directly and indirectly.Afterwards the author constructs a household production function embedded with social capital and finishes empirical test via this production function. In the end the author draws two conclusions:1) Among those interviewed families, physical capital anti-poverty policies have the most comprehensive coverage compared to all the other anti-poverty policies that aim at building other capitals. As for human capital anti-poverty policies, those targeted at students covers relatively full, while those targeted at working population has rather narrow coverage. In the case of social capital, coverage of policies is highly correlated to the development level of local economy. The coverage ratio is higher in urban areas than in suburbs and the ratio is higher in developed areas than in less developed areas.2) Overall, all kinds of capital anti-poverty policies can facilitate production but policy performances vary between urban and suburb.In the end, the thesis reviews China's anti-poverty strategy evolving process which starts from 1978 and comes to the "3 deficiencies" reflection conclusion. Combining the research result, the author proposes certain strategy adjustment suggestion and policy recommendations.The main innovations of this thesis are reflected in the following folds:First of all, the thesis builds up a theoretical context within which government anti-poverty policy performance analysis can be taken from multi-capital perspectives. By analyzing the pathway of anti-poverty policy, the thesis divides the whole process into "investment" and "production" two parts and evaluates policy performance in these two links.Second of all, starting from social capital perspective, the thesis summarizes the direct and indirect effects caused by different capitals in household production process, and build up a household production function embedded with social capital factor.Third of all, the thesis tries to explain the classification of Structural social capital and Cognitive social capital from economic perspective. The author indicates that Cognitive social capital is the subject foundation of Structural social capital while Structural social capital is the object manifestation of Cognitive social capital.Last but not least, the thesis reviews China government's anti-poverty strategy process beginning from 1978, and comes to a few reflections in the end. On this basis the author proposes a so-called "3 conversion" strategy adjustment recommendation.Due to the limitation of data source and other issues, there are also a few drawbacks within this thesis:Firstly, the thesis focuses mainly on social capital perspective. Other perspectives started from other capitals are being neglected here. Moreover the indirect effects between capitals do not get reflected in the form of household production. Thus this thesis has not tested the existence of indirect effects empirically. This is the utmost important problem that needs to be resolve in next step.Secondly, this thesis cannot identify specific policy impact on capital growth because of data limitation, which means this thesis fails in identifying ultimate policies contribution to family income growth. How to modify questionnaire and enlarge the database so as to identify those effects is another issue that ought to be worked out in future.