Study On The Poverty Status And Influencing Factors Of Rural Elderly Women In Anhui Province

Poverty, a complex social problem, has been subjected to the attention of academia and government. With the accelerating process of aging in China, the size of the elderly population is growing, due to differences in the average life expectancy of men and women, the elderly population is gradually showing a feminine characteristic, but so far, the academic have few special studies for the elderly women in rural areas, of high-risk groups. The studies mostly focus on the situation described, cause analysis and suggestions in terms of poverty among the elderly women in rural, and almost adopt the traditional income and consumption poverty measurement methods. And the government’s anti-poverty work don’t bring them into the key poverty alleviation object, their living situation is not optimistic. Thus, it is necessary to pay enough attention to the poverty problem of elderly women in rural, and this paper intends to take on the elderly women in rural as the object of research from subjective perspective.First, the paper describes the level of subjective poverty of the elderly women in rural in Anhui Province based on the frequency analysis, and then adopt the crosstab analysis and chi-square test to uncover the relationship between subjective poverty and many factors, and simply explain them. In the last, this paper brings the significant factors in chi-square into the model of Logistic regression, and analyzes the magnitude and direction of impact of four sets of factors which refer to the objective economic conditions, population sociological characteristics, health status, family factors and community environment on the elderly women’s self-rated economic welfare.The findings are as follows:first, in the378valid samples,"not poverty" accounts for77.2%("sufficient" for38%,"general" for39.2%), and subjective poverty accounts for22.8%. According to the individual average monthly income, low-income accounts for82%, middle-income accounts for13.5%and high-income accounts for4.5%. Compared with the level of subjective poverty in three categories, there are some differences. The chi-square test results show that there is a strong positive correlation between the subjective and objective economic conditions. Second, the widowed, those who are more than80years old, those who are in the low level of education, those who have non-formal job before the age of60, those who have large number of economically disadvantaged children, those who have poor living skills, and those who are in poor physical health are the ones most prone to subjective poverty. At last, after controlling for objective economic conditions and population sociological characteristics, and bringing health status, family factors and community environment into the model, the Nagelkerke R square value show that objective economic conditions do most, and then is health status, population sociological characteristics and family factors do almost the same, and community environment ranks the last. By the logistic regression, it is found that the average monthly income of individuals, the revenue comes from endowment insurance and health expenditure have a significant impact on subjective poverty of elderly women, but objective economic conditions is not the only factor. After controlling for objective economic conditions, health status is the most important force influencing elderly women’s self-rated economic welfare. The status of widow will increase the possibility of subjective poverty, but age, educational level, the nature of job before the age of60are not significant. The numbers of children, mode of living and the distance between elderly women and their children in family factors have no significant impact on the evaluation of economic. The pros and cons of the community environment, horizontal comparison between elderly women and people around them, is also not significant.According to the conclusions of this study, it puts forward some specific suggestions on relieving subjective poverty of elderly women in rural areas, but also points out the limitations of this article and makes future research prospects.