The Connection Between Poverty Concepts and Poverty Reduction Strategies: The Case of China By Lai Junhao, China
Introduction Poverty is an obvious but elusive concept. In many cases, one can easily tell if a family is stuck in poverty. However, how conceptualising different types of poverty has always been a controversial issue in academic circles. More critically, different perceptions of poverty may directly influence the design of poverty reduction policies, potentially affecting the livelihoods and lives of thousands of people. In this essay, the author will analyse how different conceptions of poverty biased towards different poverty reduction strategies from the perspectives of China. To clarify my view, three concepts of poverty are introduced. The first one is related to production as poverty is a material shortage caused by low productivity. We discuss how this biased concept leads to oversimplified strategies that only focus on production. Then we discuss the capability approach which leads to human capital related strategies and essentially emphasises the importance of distribution in poverty alleviation strategies. In the last part, we compare the social exclusion approach with the above two concepts and point out the difficulties and opportunities for its accurate application in poverty alleviation strategies.
Part I “It doesn't matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.” –– Deng Xiaopin3
Deng Xiaoping's famous "cat theory" used a cat-and-mouse metaphor to explain the most fundamental reason for China's reform and opening up - raising productivity to alleviate poverty. Deng believed that the root cause of poverty in a region was material deprivation caused by inadequate local productivity. In other words, this concept “frames poverty as deficient productivity” (Fischer, 2018, p. 190). The “productivity” here, specifically, refers to the output of every individual or the value-added they create. It is better described as “monetary value-added productivity” because it could be only measured by the money-metric approach in reality (Fischer, 2018, p. 189). Gross National Product (GDP) is usually the most important measure of productivity although its importance has waned amid much criticism. Some scholars believe that the change in individual income can be used to refer to the change in individual labour productivity, but this may be a tautology (Fischer, 2018). Even if productivity improvements do lead to higher personal incomes, they do not immediately translate into better living conditions (Pantazis, 2006). Above all, this concept of poverty focuses on the importance of growth in eradicating poverty, which by it is considered to be a lack of material and changes in poverty are observed through different moneymetric measures. This view is often criticised as an obsession with economic growth (Fischer, 2018), but it is not meaningless. On the contrary, changes in productivity do affect poverty. Productivity often sets a ceiling on income or wages. That is why proponents of this view always say, ‘let's make the pie
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The translation of this Chinese sentence is taken from China Daily (Buckle, 2018). Available at: http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201808/02/WS5b728ae4a310add14f385b4a.html
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