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Using VPI to Measure Poverty-Stricken Villages in China

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Abstract

Revealing the comprehensive poverty levels and spatial diversities of poverty-stricken villages is a prerequisite for “Entire-village Advancement” anti-poverty policy of China. In response, we build a multidimensional poverty assessment model from the perspective of spatial poverty, adopting VPI (village-level poverty index) to examine multiscale and multidimensional situations and characteristics of poverty-stricken villages in rural China, then adopting spatial geostatistics to explore their multidimensional and multiscale spatial point pattern distribution. Further, we also introduce LSE model to examine their poverty types. Our tests show that, Firstly, the validity and reliability of the VPI model can be justified in terms of village-level targeting ratio and policy-coverage ratio. Then, the poverty level of poverty-stricken villages follows a normal-right distribution, presenting an “olive” structure with a shape of “large middle, and small at two ends”, poverty levels and poverty sizes of different counties obviously increasing from east to west, and different classifications of counties also representing different poverty levels. On the other hand, there exists three kinds of multi-scale poverty clusters among different contiguous destitute areas, namely, clustering-randomness-dispersion, randomness-clustering and dispersion/randomness distribution. Villages with poverty type of three-factor dominance account for over 50 % of the total villages, their poverty are mainly caused by harsh geographical environment, disadvantaged production and living conditions, and poor labor forces. This research helps know well about the relationships among different villages from the multiscale and multidimensional views, so as to provide decision basis for optimal development and reorganization of the poverty-stricken villages in rural China, which is of vital practical significance to make overall arrangement of rural development-oriented poverty elimination and to boost new round of precise poverty elimination and new countryside construction.

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Acknowledgments

Supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 41371375), as well as by Twelve-Five science and technology support program of China (No. 2012BAH33B03).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. 3D Information Collection and Application Key Lab of Education Ministry, College of Resource Environment and Tourism, Capital Normal University, Beijing, 100084, China

    Yanhui Wang & Yefeng Chen

  2. Department of Geography and Anthropology, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA, 70803, USA

    Yanhui Wang

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  1. Yanhui Wang
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  2. Yefeng Chen
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Correspondence to Yanhui Wang.

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Wang, Y., Chen, Y. Using VPI to Measure Poverty-Stricken Villages in China. Soc Indic Res 133, 833–857 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-016-1391-5

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