Content area
Full text
Introduction
Poverty has significant, lasting, and adverse effects on an individual’s lifelong development. Globally, social assistance programs have been widely used to address poverty and have achieved notable success in poverty reduction. The key to escaping the poverty trap lies in enhancing the self-development capacity of beneficiaries. In recent years, increasing research has focused on how social assistance can strengthen this capacity, with the goal of achieving long-term, sustainable poverty alleviation (Boschman et al. 2021).
In China, the world’s largest developing country, more than 500 million people reside in underdeveloped rural areas. Although these individuals have emerged from absolute poverty, they remain vulnerable to falling back into it. The Rural Minimum Living Standard Guarantee (hereafter Rural Dibao) is China’s core policy tool for poverty governance and the most important social assistance program in rural areas. Its effectiveness in helping rural populations escape absolute poverty is well-documented (Golan et al. 2017; Kakwani et al. 2019). However, in recent times, the focus has shifted toward developing long-term, sustainable strategies to reduce poverty and prevent its resurgence. The key questions now are: Can Rural Dibao effectively contribute to long-term poverty reduction? If not, what optimizations are necessary?
Rural Dibao not only provides a safety net for vulnerable groups—such as the disabled, elderly living alone, and chronically ill individuals who are unable to work—but also assists those with the capacity to work. Achieving sustainable poverty reduction requires enhancing the self-development capacity of low-income individuals, particularly those who are capable of working, by improving their employability and enabling self-sufficiency. Non-agriculture employment is the most crucial pathway for rural residents to increase their income and escape poverty. In practice, Rural Dibao provides not only cash transfers but also implements several employment support measures, such as job referrals, public service positions, and job search subsidies. This raises important questions: Has Rural Dibao effectively promoted non-agriculture employment among beneficiaries? Is its impact sufficiently significant? Does it need to be integrated with other policies? Addressing these questions is essential to better understanding the role of Rural Dibao in long-term poverty reduction and to provide empirical evidence for future policy optimization. Nevertheless, empirical research on the association between Rural Dibao and non-agriculture employment remains limited, which may result in an underestimation of the...