The Impact Of Social Capital On Poor Families

Since the reform and opening-up, our country has achieved great success in thefield of anti-poverty. With a big drop of the absolutely poverty-stricken population,China has basically reached the well-off level and entered into the stage of building awell-off society in an all-round way. However, instead of being fundamentally solved,the problem of poverty in China has become more complicated: on the one hand, theeffect of poverty alleviation of economic growth is gradually weakening as Chinaentering the rank of middle-income countries; on the other hand, with the increasingof the relative poverty resulting from the Widening of income gap and unbalanceddevelopment in various regions, the problem of poverty in China features on thecoexistence of absolute poverty and relative poverty, regional poverty and stratumpoverty. Therefore, in this background, researching on the relative poverty problembetween China’s urban and rural households and an in-depth understanding of thedriving mechanism and influencing factors of poverty will help deepen ourunderstanding of the current poverty and provide certain theoretical and policy basisfor anti-poverty work and anti-policy-making.In this paper, on the basis of predecessors, urban and rural family poverty inChina were studied from the perspective of social capital. According to the detailedmicroscopic survey data of families and individuals of the "Chinese family dynamictracing investigation (CFPS)" by Beijing university in2010, and with the reference ofthe poverty line of the OECD, family with per capita income less than50%of themedian of per capita income of all families is defined as relatively poor family,otherwise is non-relatively poor family. We adopt two different measurement methodsto study the role of social capital towards family poverty from the aspects of familyand community. At the same time, this article also studied the differential influence offactors such as human feature of families and location on poor families. The studywas divided into two step: the first is to observe the influence of social capital on thepoor situation of families; the second is to study the effect of social capital on the dynamic change of poor situation. Study shows that: firstly, the social capital offamily level nor the social capital of community level can significantly reduce theincidence of poor families; secondly, family and community level gift spending seemshave positive impact of poverty, but not significant. The social capital of family levelhas significantly negative influence on poor situation, and the community level ofsocial capital has significantly positive influence. This may be due to the social capitalof community level represents a competitive power, the larger social capital peoplehas, the more intense the compete is; thirdly, the inhibiting effect of the social capital of family level on the poverty entrance is greater than the promoting effect on thepoverty exit, again showing that social capital is more advantageous to the rich stayrich, and social capital is the capital of the rich; fourthly, as an important humancapital, education is one of the important factors that affect family poverty, theimprovement of education degree, not only can effectively reduce the possibility offamilies in poverty, but also significantly increase the probability of families get rid ofpoverty or stay rich.