ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 discussed the government’s official method for identifying the poor. A problem with this official method is the use of quotas and the political and arbitrary aspects of the exercise. The poverty line was found to be hardly useful, and household surveys were seldom carried out. The literature makes frequent reference to the use of the monetary approach for poverty assessment at the village level in China (McCulloch and Calandrino 2003). To learn whether the monetary approach to poverty assessment is valuable at this level and how it is used to identify the poor, this chapter takes a fresh look at the monetary approach using household survey data collected by the author from May 2005 to March 2006 in nine villagers’ groups in four natural villages in Jiankang. These are the same villages studied in the previous chapter.
