The Role Of Education In Poverty Alleviation

Since the founding of new China in 1949,through the continuous efforts of the Chinese people,China will achieve the goal of lifting all rural poor out of poverty by 2020.Since reform and opening up,China’s real per capita income increased by 23 times,more than seven hundred million poor people out of poverty,poverty reduced from 1978 in 770 million to 2018 in 16.6 million,the rural poverty rate from 97.5%in 1978 to 0.6%in 2019,China took in just 40 years created a miracle in the history of human poverty,is has the largest number of people in the history of poverty reduction.But the disappearance of absolute poverty in a statistical sense does not mean the end of China’s poverty reduction.On the one hand,poverty alleviation is a long-term undertaking,and the key to its success lies in not returning to poverty.Due to the large gap in economic development levels among different regions,the people lifted out of poverty under the definition of absolute poverty in remote rural areas after 2020,especially in the "three regions and three states" and other deep poverty-stricken areas,may not get long-term stable income under the poverty alleviation policy even though their income has been satisfied to some extent,and there is a risk of poverty return.There are many ways to reduce poverty,including direct measures such as providing basic needs,employment opportunities and even income to the poor,as well as indirect methods such as free access to education,health support and other services,so that the poor can have more opportunities to earn higher income and thus increase the probability of escaping from poverty.Clearly,the nature and effect of the latter may be long-term and the results of this approach to poverty reduction will be longer lasting and more sustainable.General Secretary Xi Jinping stressed that poverty alleviation must be supported by wisdom and that children in poor areas should receive high-quality education,which is an important task in poverty reduction and an important way to break the intergenerational transmission of poverty.Improving the accumulation of human capital through education has become the basic strategic orientation of poverty reduction policies in many countries.Although the way and scale of investment are different,there are many commonalities in the direction of education investment,that is,improving national quality and labor skills through education promotion and financing policies with a certain range and intensity.In terms of basic education,it has taken China less than 20 years since it promulgated the Law of the People’s Republic of China on Compulsory Education(hereinafter referred to as the "Education Law")in April 1986 to achieve the strategic goal of making nine-year compulsory education universal and basically eliminating illiteracy among young and middle-aged adults.The average length of schooling of the population has risen from less than five years in the early years of the founding of new China to more than nine years now.So,in terms of rural development,the popularization of compulsory education provides rural residents with better educational opportunities,but does it improve their ability to escape poverty independently?This is a problem worthy of further study and also the starting point of this study.Based on this,this paper empirically analyzes the impact of education on poverty based on the mixed cross section data from the China Family Tracking Survey(CFPS)(2010 and 2012).First of all,this paper constructs a generalized double difference method to identify the policy effect of compulsory education law,and studies and analyzes the impact of education law on years of schooling and poverty.To further test whether the improvement of education can improve the independent poverty reduction ability of residents.Secondly,this paper constructed instrumental variables through the education method to identify the causal relationship between education and poverty.Due to the large time span in the sample of this paper,a series of robustness tests were also conducted,such as placebo test,control of time trend,elimination of mixing factors and selection bias,etc.Finally,combined with the mechanism analysis,this paper from the employment structure,wage income two aspects of mechanism analysis.The main conclusions of this paper are as follows:(1)the implementation of compulsory education law has significantly improved the education level of school-age children,and reduced the probability of residents falling into poverty,that is,poverty reduction effect.The results of sample regression showed that the poverty reduction effect was not significant in areas with low initial compulsory education penetration rate and areas with poor implementation of compulsory education law.The study also found that the implementation of compulsory education law had a greater impact on the years of schooling of male sample group than female sample group,and also increased the probability of poverty alleviation of male sample group,but had no significant impact on poverty reduction of female group.(2)This paper further USES the instrumental variable method to identify the causal effect of education on poverty,and finds that the improvement of education level can reduce the probability of falling into poverty.Specifically,the probability of falling into absolute poverty decreases by about 5%and the probability of falling into multi-dimensional poverty decreases by about 7%for each year of increasing the years of education.In addition,the robustness test from multiple aspects shows that this result is robust,including eliminating the influence of time trend,exogenous policy impact and instrumental variable measurement error.(3)The empirical analysis of the impact mechanism of education poverty reduction shows that the higher the level of education,the lower the probability of agricultural labor,which increases the probability of off-farm work,especially off-farm employment.In other words,education can help farmers to broaden their employment channels.In addition,as education improves,so does personal income,and education has a greater impact on the poor.The innovations of this paper are as follows:First,there are few literatures that directly test the causal relationship between education and poverty.This paper,by constructing instrumental variables to test the causal relationship,has well identified the poverty reduction effect of education.Second,unlike the study on the return on education,poverty is a further study relative to income.Poverty is not defined by individual income,and just because education increases income does not mean it reduces the probability of an individual falling into poverty.In addition,this paper defines poverty from the perspective of absolute poverty and multidimensional poverty,which can well explain the effectiveness of poverty reduction through education.Thirdly,there are few papers related to compulsory education law that use the double difference model to identify the policy effect.This paper USES the double difference method to solve the endogeneity problem well.Fourthly,this paper expounds the mechanism of the influence of education on poverty,which is a useful supplement to the current literature which only deals with the influence of education on poverty from a single Angle.The research in the above aspects has important reference significance for educational design and the long-term mechanism of "preventing poverty alleviation" relying on education.