Village poverty governance and the subjective well-being of households in central and western rural China

ABSTRACT

Using survey data from 633 households in China’s central and western regions, this article employs a life satisfaction approach to examine the influence of village poverty governance on the subjective well-being of rural households and estimates the monetary value of poverty governance. Applying the 2SLS and instrumental variable methods, this study demonstrated that improving village poverty governance can help increase the subjective well-being of rural households. The results also indicated that village poverty governance has a significant positive impact on the well-being of non-poor households but has no significant impact on the well-being of poor households. Given this difference, the participation of poor households in village poverty governance should be increased, and the capability approach of poor groups should be reinforced to prevent unfair procedures and uneven resource allocation.

KEYWORDS:

• Village poverty governance
• subjective well-being
• life satisfaction approach
• instrumental variables

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Unbalanced socio-economic development has led to the existence of contiguous poor areas with particular difficulties (CPAPD) in China. The Chinese government has delimitated 14 CPAPDs in 2011, including the Liupan Mountain area, Qinba Mountain area, Dabie Mountain area, and Lvliang Mountain area.

2. According to a survey of 156 countries in the 2017 World Happiness Report, China’s happiness is at a low level. The top five countries were all European – Finland, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, and Switzerland – and their happiness values were all 7.46 or more.

3. The annual per capita net income may not be a positive value. The data was processed as follows. The average income of the same households with the same self-assessment income level was used instead of 0 or the negative value. Then, the natural logarithm of the annual per capita net income of all sample households plus 1 was calculated.

4. According to the annual per capita net income of the family, the provincial poverty alleviation standards in 2017 are as follows: Shaanxi 3070 yuan/person/year, Gansu 3700 yuan/person/year, Shanxi 3200 yuan/person/year, and Henan 3208 yuan/person/year.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Social Science Foundation of China under grant number [17BJY137].

Notes on contributors

Qiuqian Zhao

Qiuqian Zhao is a PhD candidate researching rural governance at the College of Economics and Management of the Northwest Sci-Tech University of Agriculture and Forestry, Yangling, China.

Xianli Xia

Xianli Xia is a professor of rural social development at the College of Economics and Management of the Northwest Sci-Tech University of Agriculture and Forestry, Yangling, China.