Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Poor Villages
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County Planning Commission County and Township Infrastructure and Village Poverty Reduction
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1.6 The Poverty Pyramid: A Structural and Philosophical Framework for CPAP
1.6.1 Understanding Poverty: A Functional Poverty Pyramid 82 Poverty is both systemic and functional. At the systemic level, deliberate attention is given to the problems that plague the livelihoods of the poor, the sources of these problems, and the institutional constraints that keep poor people poor, no matter how hard they work to escape their poverty. Participatory approaches to development attempt to redress the lack of respect that systemic poverty structures deny the poor as a group. Participatory poverty reduction planning also rejects the welfare handout approach to poverty alleviation, that dismiss the poor as without the skills and the capacity to contribute in a major way to the abolition of village poverty. At the functional level, attention is directed to how the poor earn their livelihoods, the absolute return to their work effort, and the constraints that keep these returns low. By combining these two ways of looking at poverty, we construct a view of poverty and the opportunities to reduce poverty that is pro-poor, pro-self-help, and inclusive of the poor in poverty reduction planning. 83 A poverty pyramid illustrates how systemic and functional poverty is revealed at village level,. On the vertical axis the pyramid shows average earnings per person in each strata of functional poverty. It is possible to view the vertical axis as showing the relative productivity of poor people by their primary source of livelihood, even where this is only a part-time source of employment. On the horizontal axis the poverty pyramid shows the 27
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45000 yuan 3500 yuan 2500 yuan 1500 yuan 800 yuan
58 person 1000 person 1200 person 20 person 600 person 1400 person 1900 person
1750 person
Males labor
Females labor
85 The poverty pyramid shown in Diagram 1.3 hypothesizes that the rural poor can be viewed as resting on a base made up of vulnerable poor whose poverty is characterized by their dependence on others for their survival. The poor earn very little per person, typically because young children, the old aged, the disabled, the unemployed, those whose movement is restricted, such as the disable and those recovering from injury, predominate among the poor villagers classed in this group. In China the vulnerable poor usually make up a small proportion of the village. In China there is a program known as the five guarantees, which targets the disabled, old aged without work opportunities, and those with serious heath problems. Finance for the 5 guarantees is raised by a village committee under a collective levy on each house, supplemented by both local and central government funds where natural disasters or poverty mean that individual villages cannot afford to provide for the 5 guarantees from local household levies. Because of the existence of the 5 guarantees program, this group of poor villagers is not regarded as among the direct target beneficiaries of poverty reduction initiatives instigated by the LGOP network. However, new poverty reduction policy adopted by the State Council 28
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Baseline Data
Supporting Need
Project Need
Monitory Plan
Supporting System
County Project
Village Project
Implementation Plan
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121 First there is the group termed Policy Stakeholders, who must initiate CPAP and enable the process that will defer decision making authority to the target group, poor households in poor villages. The Policy Stakeholder group is led by the State Council of the People's Republic of China. The will of the State Council is translated into national policy guidelines and priorities by the Leading Group Office of Poverty Alleviation and Development . The LGOP stands at the head of a nation wide network of county-level branches, known as the CPAO, which implements policy directives received through the LGOP. Above the LGOP but in partnership with it, there is the State Development Planning Commission and its national network of County Development Planning Commissions. CPAP must achieve closer collaboration between development planers, the LGOPs county counterparts, and poor villagers. Over time one should see priorities in county development plans give greater weight to poverty reduction in the preparation of county development plans. As this happens, the range of policy level stakeholders will expand to include all ministries and finance agencies, including development assistance agencies, contributing to development planning in China. 122 The second group of stakeholders in CPAP are those who can be identified as the Implementation Stakeholders. While the LGOP has carriage for guidelines and policy definition, it is the county-level Poverty Alleviation Office and the Village Poverty Reduction Group that are the key members of this group. The CPAO and the VPRG are responsible for mobilizing villagers, facilitating and scheduling CPAP activities. The in-line agencies and ministries are also members of the implementation group, but they take their lead as service providers indirectly from the CPAO and the VPRG. NGOs, consultants and training providers are in a similar position as another class of service provider, but NGOs can be expected to take a keen and, possibly, a more altruistic interest. It would be surprising if 38
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Ezekiel, H, 1965, The Pattern of Investment and Economic Growth, Indian Economic Journal, Vol. xiii, No. 12, p. 199-216. Fang, Cai, et al, 2000, A Study of the Efficiency of Financial Inputs in Poverty Alleviation in China, Ph.D Forum, Beijing FAO, 1996, Growth Theories Old and New, Oxford UP, New York Farmar, Anna, 1988, eds., The Developing World, Development Education Support Centre, Dublin. Fields, GS, 1980, Poverty, Inequality and Development, Cambridge University Press, New York. Findlay, Christopher, Andrew Watson and Harry Wu, 1995, Rural Enterprises in China, Macmillan, London. Fishlow, Albert, 1995, Inequality, Poverty and Growth: Where Do We Stand?, in Bruno, Michael and Boris Pleskovic, 1995, eds., Annual World Bank Conference on Development Economics, World Bank, Washington, D.C. Geddes, Bill, Jenny Hughes & Joe Remenyi, 1994, Anthropology and Third World Development, Deakin UP, Geelong. Goudzwaard, Bob and Harry de Lange, 1995, Beyond Poverty and Affluence, William B Eerdmans Publising, Grand Rapids for WCC. Gupta, SP, 1971, Planning Models in India, Praeger, New York. Hazel, Peter BR & C Ramasamy, 1991, The Green Revolution Reconsidered, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore. Hirschman, Albert O, 1958, The Strategy of Economic Development, Yale University Press, New Haven. Hopper, WD, 1965, Allocation efficiency in traditional Indian agriculture, Journal of Farm Economics, Vol. 47, No. 3. International Finance Corporation, 2000, Paths Out of Poverty, World Bank, Washington, DC 48
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