Research On The Social Assistance Mode Of Expenditure-type Poor Families

Poverty, being an international issue, is everywhere in both developed and developing countries and arouses deep concern of the society from all walks of life. As early as 1999, China has established the social assistance system mainly based on the lowest life guarantee system, assisted with the special assistance system including health care, education and housing, and supplemented by rescue and relief of other sources as well as social help. This system provides assistance to absolutely low status groups. However, taking income as its core standards, it fails to provide assistance to a special poverty group with big rigid expenditure overflowing their income which is higher than the poverty line. Since 2007, this group has aroused attention from the government. Marginal poverty group was included in the assistance system in the first place, then temporary assistance system, together with other special assistances has been established to provide supplement guarantee. Due to the fuzziness and randomness of the temporary assistance system as well as the binding between the lowest life guarantee assistance and other special assistances, expenditure poverty group, featured by higher income than the poverty line, is still beyond social assistance. It is in extremely urgent to establish specialized social assistance system for them.Expenditure poverty group refers to a group of people who fall into poverty as their rigid expenditure surpasses their income by illness, unexpected disasters, or educational issues. Rather than being a new emergence poverty group, the expenditure poverty group is the poverty group been neglected for a long time under the assistance thought taking income as the standard. Now, they are gaining acknowledgment by the society with the development of assistance thought. Through interview investigation on expenditure poverty families in Gangzha district, Nantong City, the category, features, causes for poverty and assistance outcome of expenditure poverty group are studied. The problems of assistance pattern are analyzed through both assistance policy aspect and assistance pattern aspect. For assistance policy aspect, the problems lay in backward qualification examination, inflexible assistance measures and infeasible policies. For assistance pattern aspect, the problems are explored form perspective of assurance working staff and perspective of expenditure poverty families and reasons are provides though three aspects:assistance thought, system design and mechanism of management and running.Learning from assistance pattern applied to similar groups in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and the United States, suggestions are given from aspects of assistance thought, assistance mechanism and assistance measures and tentative assistance pattern of "Government + enterprises + social organizations" is proposed. Besides, poverty concept and standard poverty measurement graph is applied to define expenditure poverty assistance objects that should be assisted but actually failed to receive any. Expenditure poverty is defined by actual living standard and qualification examination is conducted according to actual ability to shake off poverty, employment intention and degree of poverty. Social organizations and enterprises are expected to take joint work in the harness of poverty in order to realize the government's functional transformation. Meanwhile, individual development account should be set up for expenditure poverty group to help them accumulate assets and improve their ability against risks. Lastly, scientific mechanisms of assessment, supervision and exit are needed to stop the waste of resources.