Research On The Urban Social Assistance System From The Perspective Of The Capability

The theoretical perspective of this article is the capability approach of Amartya Sen. In Sen’s view of development, the chief purpose of development is to realize the freedom and to expand people’s capability. With this capability, people can live the lives they want to live. When people don’t have the basic capability to reach the normal living standard, they will be poor. So Sen believes the essence of poverty is deprived of capability, not only the low income. The policy should pay more attention to expanding the capability of the poor.With this theory, the article reviews the development of the urban social assistance policy in China. During several decades, the urban social assistance system has developed from the temporary life assistance to the new social assistance, which takes the urban Dibao program as core. It has made a great process in content and the way of assistance. The urban social assistance is more institutionalization and standardization. it was once useful to alleviating poverty in urban area. But with the complication and diversification of urban poverty, the defect of this system appears. The passive assistance idea, the small coverage, the low standard and the simple way of assistance, make the system an income maintenance policy. It can only satisfy the basic need of the poor, but cannot expand their capability and help them get rid of poverty thoroughly. What’s worse is that it may lead to welfare dependency and social exclusion. The most important reason is the lack of capability-oriented policy in urban social assistance system.The article analyzes the capability insufficiency of the poor in urban from the respect of income, education, employment, medical treatment, housing and social communication with a lot of data. From the analysis, we can see that the urban poverty has some new features nowadays, including united deprivation, stratum poverty, risk of poverty and so on.So, in order to help the poor and alleviate the urban poverty, we should transform our income-orientated social assistance system to capability-orientated social assistance. Set up a positive and initiative assistance idea. Take asset social policies, community services, empowerment and some other special capability assistance policies to develop the capability of the poor and realize the real freedom!...