The Alleviation Of Household-level Poverty Vulnerability Through Ability Enhancement And Empowerment

Poverty alleviation has reached a critical stage.Whether the vulnerable and marginal households can achieve stable poverty alleviation and sustainable development needs to be carefully examined.The continuous efforts of poverty alleviation work have improved the livelihood of poor households to achieve a great extent,but how to improve the quality of poverty alleviation further requires careful consideration.Support measures focusing on "Two worry-free and three guarantees" may neglect the formation of viable abilities of poor households,and a strong target-oriented mechanism triggered by precise identification may exacerbate the welfare cliff effect between poor households and non-poor households.Due to a lack of capacity and rights,the vulnerability of rural households to poverty cannot be ignored,making ability enhancement and empowerment crucial paths to achieve sustainable poverty alleviation.Empowerment is a prerequisite of ability enhancement,whereas ability enhancement is a reflection of empowerment.Based on the field survey data of the Taihang Mountains in a series of extremely poor areas in 2018,this study investigates the alleviation of poverty vulnerability from the perspective of ability enhancement and empowerment.This article is mainly divided into three parts:Firstly,through the review of the literature and the framework analysis,this article summarizes and introduces the theory of poverty vulnerability,and introduces a sustainable livelihood analysis framework to clarify the logical framework between ability enhancement and empowerment and poverty alleviation.Enhancing the five types of livelihood capital,which will in turn lead to livelihood results that alleviate poverty vulnerability.Secondly,based on field survey data,this paper calculates the poverty vulnerability of farmers in Taihang mountainous areas.Then,based on descriptive statistics of the basic characteristics of farmers in Taihang mountainous areas,this paper analyzes the problems.An instrumental variable approach is applied to address the potential endogeneity problem,and a sub-group regression analysis is utilized to account for the discrepancy in endowment between poor and non-poor villages or households,respectively.Finally,based on the empirical results,the results show that:(1)Both abilityenhancement and empowerment have positive impacts on the alleviation of poverty vulnerability and the formation of sustainable livelihood;(2)Insufficient capacity may cause non-poor villages to face a "new relative poverty" dilemma whereas insufficient empowerment may lead to the phenomenon of "shadow under the lamp" in non-poor villages;(3)Empowerment is more effective in alleviating the vulnerability of poverty-stricken households,and empowerment of production rights and employment rights can reduce the discrepancy between poor and non-poor households.After entering the era of post-poverty eradication,poverty governance should focus on poverty vulnerability and multidimensional relative poverty.We should pay attention to the formation of farmers' feasible capabilities and equal opportunity empowerment,and promote the synergistic improvement of individual sustainable livelihood capital,and alleviate poverty vulnerability and multidimensional relative poverty.