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Abstract
China is trying to reduce the high levels of poverty in its border regions, dominated by ethnic minorities. To do so, it is giving particular attention to increasing physical and human capital but not social capital. This article investigates the extent to which social capital (and other variables) are associated with the absence of poverty in such regions. To this end, data were collected from a sample of households in the Kirghiz Prefecture of Xinjiang and analyzed using logistic regression analysis and other methods. Some components of social capital and some other variables show a significant association with the absence of poverty. However, care is needed in applying the results because association must not be confused with causality. Limited opportunities exist for productive investment in the border regions considered. Several issues raised are also relevant to remote (ethnic) communities outside of China. The government’s scope for altering social capital is assessed.
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank Sabah Abdullah, Chandra Maitra and Haishan Yuan for their helpful comments as well as reviewers for their constructive recommendations. The usual caveat applies.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributors
Hong Liu is Associate Professor in the School of Economics of Minzu University, Beijing, China. Her research interests include land-use, urbanization and regional development, poverty alleviation, immigrants and ethnic minorities in China.
Clement Tisdell is Professor Emeritus in Economics at The University of Queensland, a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia and an Honorary Professor of The People’s (Renmin) University, China. He has a wide range of research interests. These include economic development issues in the Asia-Pacific, especially China.
Fei Wang is Associate Professor in the School of Economics of Minzu University, Beijing, China. His main research fields are regional innovation, regional development, poverty, minority economics, as well as China’s foreign aid.
Notes
1 According to ‘China Poverty Alleviation and Development Report 2016’ published by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and the State Council Poverty Alleviation Office on 27 December 2016, a major goal is to eliminate rural poverty by 2020.
2 The interviews were conducted in the Kirghiz language and each took about 2½ hours to complete. College students from Minzu University from the local area who knew the local language were trained to conduct the interviews. Respondents were given a small packaged treat, a towel and ten yuan on completion of the questionnaire.
3 Due to the limited sample size, we used the confirmatory factor analysis to reduce the dimensionality of social capital variables. The standardized variables representing social networks and mutual trust (except for s8 and s9 that did not pass the reliability test) have a KMO statistic of 0.64, which satisfies the premise of performing confirmatory factor analysis. According to the gravel map and the factor score, two common factors, the social network factor network and the trust mutual help factor trusthelp, were extracted in order to obtain the following indexes.
The eigenvalues are 1.5 and 1.4 respectively, and explain the variance of the variables by 62% and 58% respectively. The correlation coefficient is only 0.04. The variables s8 and s9 are chosen to represent the specification.
4 In the logistic model with sub-indicators instead of network index, the coefficients of s1, s2, s3, and s4 are, respectively 0.98, 1.00, 1.29, and 0.79, with p-value 0.454, 0.015, 0.002, and 0.206.
5 For some information about this see Tisdell (Citation2014, ch. 16) and Tisdell (2017, pp. 44–45).