Dynamics of Rural Poverty in China
Ref. no. 678-79C
Panel data on households (data tracking the same households over time) in developing countries are rare. Yet the need for such data is great for a number of reasons. The vagaries of rain-fed agriculture bring issues of risk and transient poverty to the fore, and transient poverty is also an important issue in the economic transition and adjustment that many of these countries have been undergoing. Conventional data are less than ideal for informing policy decisions in such settings.
This project constructed a large new panel data set for four provinces of rural China from a time series of household surveys from 1985 to 1990. Conducted by China's State Statistical Bureau, these surveys repeatedly resampled a large number of households. The four provinces range from a prosperous coastal region (where reforms have brought rapid gains) to far less prosperous, lagging inland areas. The data appear to be of good quality by prevailing standards.
The data allowed investigation of many research issues. In addition to creating the data set, the project focused on an important subset of these issues. In particular, it investigated the dynamics of poverty in rural China during 198590 and the determinants of both the persistent and the transient components of household consumption. This research was the first systematic investigation to use household-level data in analyzing the transitions into and out of poverty in rural China during a period of economic reform and growth.
The project involved close collaboration with China's State Statistical Bureau, both in constructing the data set and in drawing on the results of the research, to help the bureau put on a firm footing future poverty monitoring efforts using these and other data.
Results of the research have directly informed two tasks in Bank operations, the Southwest China Poverty Reduction Project and ongoing economic and sector work on income distribution in China.
Responsibility: Policy Research Department, Poverty and Human Resources Division--Martin Ravallion (mravallion@worldbank.org), Shaohua Chen, and Jyotsna Jalan.
Completion date: December 1996.
Reports:
Chen, Shaohua, and Martin Ravallion. 1996. "Data in Transition: Assessing Rural Living Standards in Southern China." China Economic Review 7(1):2355.
Jalan, Jyotsna, and Martin Ravallion. 1996. "Transient Poverty in Rural China." Policy Research Working Paper 1612. World Bank, Policy Research Department, Washington, DC.
_____. 1997. "Are the Poor Less Well Insured? Evidence on Vulnerability to Income Risk in Rural China." World Bank, Policy Research Department, Washington, DC.
_____. 1997. "Consumption Variability and Rural Poverty in Post-Reform China." World Bank, Policy Research Department, Washington, DC.
_____. 1997. "Transient and Chronic Poverty in Rural China: A Semiparametric Estimation." World Bank, Policy Research Department, Washington, DC.
Ravallion, Martin, and Shaohua Chen. 1997. "When Economic Reform Is Faster than Statistical Reform: Measuring and Explaining Inequality in Rural China." World Bank, Policy Research Department, Washington, DC.
Back to Transition Economies contents
Back to 1997 Abstracts of Current Studies Home Page
