Jointly conducted by the Ministry of Finance, the Development Research Center of The State Council and the World Bank,“Forty Years of Poverty Alleviation in China: Driving forces, Lessons learned and future policy directions”was released in Beijing on Thursday. The study analyzed the main drivers of Poverty alleviation in China over the past 40 years, summarized the lessons of China's poverty alleviation experience for other developing countries, and made recommendations for China's future policy directions.
According to the report, the speed and scale of China's economic growth and poverty alleviation over the past 40 years have been unprecedented. Based on the 2010 national poverty standard, the incidence of poverty in rural areas dropped from 97.5 percent to 0.6 percent from 1978 to 2019, and the number of poor people in rural areas dropped from 770 million to 5.5 million, a reduction of nearly 765 million. The poverty rate dropped by 2.4 percentage points per year on average. Measured by the World Bank's global absolute poverty standard of $1.90 per person per day, the incidence of poverty in China dropped from 88.1 percent in 1981 to 0.3 percent in 2018, with nearly 800 million fewer people living in poverty, accounting for nearly 75 percent of global poverty reduction during the same period. On the whole, China has been ahead of the rest of the world in poverty alleviation.
The report pointed out that, China's efforts to tackle absolute poverty mainly rely on two pillars. One is broad-based economic transformation, which has provided new development opportunities for the poor and constantly raised their income levels. Second, the government implements targeted poverty alleviation policies to eliminate chronic poverty. These policies are aimed at poor areas affected by geographical environment and other reasons, and targeted poverty alleviation strategies are implemented for the poor population. The report also stressed that China's achievements in economic development and poverty alleviation have been attributed to effective governance, the cooperation of various government departments and the full play of the initiative of all sectors of society.
Translated by Zhou Mengjiao