An Empirical Study On Poverty Changes Of Urban Residents In Jiangxi Province

Before1990s, China’s poverty took place mainly in rural regions. As a result, the anti-poverty policy and poverty research are mainly focused on the rural poverty. However, in the middle of1990s, with the reform of state-owned corporation, social insurance system and the rural-to-urban migrants institution, the problem of urban poverty occurred. In other words, a lot of people now live in poor situation in cities. So did the situation in Jiangxi Province. Based on this, this paper aims to construct a scientific, universal and comparable method for poverty line calculation and poverty measurement, so as to get to know the real situation of urban poverty in Jiangxi. By measuring poverty, it is hoped that we could analyze the characteristics and source of urban poverty, and counter-poverty policies could be put forward in a scientific way.Identify poverty and the poverty line is the starting point of all poverty analysis, the article begins with a brief overview of the background and relevant references in the writing of this article, and pointed out that the innovation of this paper. Then we discussed the poor connotation, classification and poverty estimates. We use the corresponding grouped data to compute the poverty line for urban residents in Jiangxi Province, and we compared the calculation results of calendar year.This paper reviews the theoretical development and achievements on aggregate poverty measurement in the past century and points out how to construct suitable poverty indices for Jiangxi. This dissertation measures the extension and intensity of urban poverty using grouped data. And we find that there are three stages:low-level poverty index, the rapid rise in the poverty index and the slow decline for index. Lots of urban people who have labor ability now fall into poverty, which is different from traditional one. We also find that the main cause of urban poverty is due to series of policies reform during economic transition, such as income inequality, unemployment, housing expenditure, education expenditure, and medical expenditure. Those reforms have great effect on urban residents in many respects, such as living cost, income, competition and uncertainty. After analysis, we realize that, economic growth is the source of relieving poverty. However, economic growth itself could not alleviate poverty automatically, especially for structural poverty. Both growth rate and income distribution have great effect on poverty alleviation. It is also noticed that market economy needs the protection of various insurance mechanism. Income transfer and social insurance system could supplement the function of market distribution. Therefore, the next step is to enlarge the aid to poor people and set up various social security systems with wider range. During the process of anti-poverty, the government maximizes the effect of poverty eliminating under various restrictions, especially fund restriction. Thus, this dissertation discusses poverty measurement method and anti-poverty target under different restrictions. In case of policy, poverty index should be in favor of implementation, evaluation and justice of anti-poverty policy. With scarce resources, different measurement methods mean different anti-poverty policies.The aim of poverty measurement is to help identify, monitor and arouse people’s attention for the issue of poverty, as well as providing scientific proof for anti-poverty campaign. The most severe period of urban poverty is during the economy transition from planning economy to market economy, as well as from agriculture economy to industrial economy. As a result, the research helps us to understand and provide aid to urban poor people, so as to construct a better and sustainable society. The research of a transition economy is also meaningful to enlarging the view of international poverty research.