ABSTRACT
Comparing different approaches to poverty assessment and their applicability to the same population in an empirical study is new, especially in the context of China. The current research tested four ways to identify the poor in Jiankang Villagers’ Committee, Wuding County, Yunnan Province, southwest China. The study population comprised 1,798 people in 473 households. For this population, the preceding chapters have presented the implementation and results of China’s official poverty identification method, the monetary approach to poverty identification, participatory poverty assessment and the use of multidimensional poverty indicators. The central hypothesis was that different approaches would generate different poverty incidences and identify households with different characteristics as the poor, thus leading to different policy implications. This study had two specific objectives: (1) to explore differences that arise from the use of the various approaches to identify the poor; and (2) to derive the potential policy implications of these. To this end, a number of questions were answered:
What incidences of poverty are obtained using the different approaches?
What households are identified as poor by the different approaches; and what is the degree of overlap and differential coverage between the results of the different approaches?
What do the alternative approaches highlight and hide?
Does the choice of approach have implications for policy and action?
