Dynamic Multidimensional Measurement Of Poverty In China

This article is a review paper about the evolution of the concept of poverty. The development of poverty study has experimented from initiatively absolute poverty and relative poverty to capacity poverty, and to entitlement poverty including the vulnerable power by individual or household, and then, to the concept of social exclusion. As we all know, the concept of poverty is a continuous process from lower to higher level, and from single dimension to multidimensional poverty, from static to dynamic process. It is a course that has become gradually deepen, extended and refinement. During this paper, we have collected several multidimensional poverty index about individual and household which including two aspects of standard axiom and nonstandard axiom. They are Watts poverty index, Hagenaars multidimensional poverty, Tusi multidimensional poverty, MP1multidimensional poverty, capacity poverty index, and human poverty index and so no. The paper has made further efforts to review foreign research on poverty and methods of poverty measurement, and to make an comparison on the advantages and disadvantages between standard axiom index and nonstandard axiom index. MPI index is our best option above all and we add the dimension of income to it. Therefore, there is total four dimensions that consist of eleven indicators, involving the initial dimensions of living level, health and education.This paper is based on the date of China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS) statistics from1989year to2009year in the parts of empirical study and we apply the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to assign the weights of indicators. During the transition period in China, we measure income poverty and multidimensional poverty in the urban and rural areas, together with central provinces, eastern provinces and western provinces. We research the dynamic trend in nine provinces. The results show that rural areas are the main causes of poverty in the both sides of income poverty and multidimensional poverty, by contrary, rural areas have a better poverty reduction than that of urban; there is significantly different on the four dimensions of income, health, education and quality of life. From the aspects of indicators, sanitation, medical insurance, cooking fuel, health status, education and capita income are higher rate of poverty. They also have a large percentage of contribution rate of poverty; sanitation poverty is the most serious, whereas the rate of illumination poverty is lowest; in the terms of nine provinces, the income poverty and multidimensional poverty in Henan province are the most serious, the second is GuizhouProvince and Guangxi is the third; the multidimensional poverty of Hunan province and Hubei Province are the lowest, that is not in the eastern region which is higher level of develop in China. Last but not the least, Henan province, Guizhou Province and Guangxi province are the main causes of poverty and we can safely see that multidimensional poverty has weakly relationship to the level of economic development between different areas.In conclusion, government not only will pay more attention to the gap between rural and city, or among provinces, but also should attach importance to welfare poverty, especially the live standard, health, education and so on. Therefore, comparing the single dimension poverty, multidimensional poverty can explain the present situation of poverty and give a clear illustration of the reality in China. From the viewpoint of multidimensional poverty, government can make a more scientific and rational anti-poverty policy and take more attention to domestic people’s livelihood. Only with this way can the government eliminate present "multidimensional economy" structure.