The Determinants Of Participation In The Minimum Livelihood Guarantee Program

The Minimum Livelihood Guarantee Program,(zuidi shenghuo baozhang) popularly referenced as Dibao in Chinese, is one of the largest means-tested cash transfer schemes in the world, though remarkably little has previously been known overseas. It provides benefits for households whose income failed to reach a locally-determined minimal threshold to guarantee a minimum living standard. The program was initiated in Shanghai in1993and officially adopted as a national policy in1999, mainly to secure social stability and facilitate the state enterprises’reform, when millions of once-state workers had been removed from their posts and deprived of their traditional work-unit-grounded welfare. In its initiation, the Dibao program was limited to urban residents with local non-agricultural household registry (hukou). Later on, it gradually expanded to agricultural hukou households, with a total coverage of75.245million recipients and an annual subsidy of96.97billion Chinese Yuan in2010(National Bureau of Statistics,2011). It has become the main poverty alleviation program in China.Concerns about identification of the truly needy people and exclusion of the ineligible ones naturally arise when cash transfers are used to fight poverty. As an evolving social assistance program, Dibao has encountered quite a few knotty issues in its design and operation. One of them is the targeting mechanism. Verified means testing and community screening have been adopted to determine eligibility and the level of benefits of its targets in the program. However, reliance on means test for social assistance poses problems in both program management and effectiveness. And the humiliating effect of community screening has been widely criticized, most frequently by western observers. How to identify the truly needy people and exclude the ineligible ones? How do the potential recipients themselves perceive the stigma effect? How to improve the overall performance of program? To answer these questions, we need a novel perspective.Based on previous theoretical researches, it adopts normative analysis and empirical analysis in addition to qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis, and utilizes quantitative analytic data and spotted surveys. Accordingly, it put forwards relevant solutions to promote participation in Dibao, reformation and improvement of social assistant program. The framework can be divided into six chapters:the first chapter is introduction, including the theme’s origin, value and research’s frame, methods. The second chapter is carding and analyzing foreign and domestic relative researches, this part explores fruits and drawbacks of the subject, holding the function of reference and innovation. The third chapter is data origin, theoretical model and hypothesis, based on the previous theoretical achievements and spotted surveys. The forth chapter is data analysis and result discussion. Making use of the SPSS software, it scientifically analyzes the questionnaire data in order to check the relative theoretical assumption mentioned. The fifth and sixth chapters are measures and research conclusions. In the fifth, according to the mentioned data analytic result, this part gives strategies to improve the participation of Dibao. In the sixth, it summarizes the paper’s fruits and defects, and then points out a following research direction.