Xiaobing Wang's team published an article in World Development

Release date：2023/10/23　　Source： CCAP

On October 19, 2023, Xiaobing Wang's team of researchers at the School of Modern Agriculture, Peking University and collaborators published a research paper online in the international academic journal World Development“Catch up with my husband as I can: Women’s decision-making power consequences of China’s poverty alleviation relocation program ”.

It has long been widely recognized that poverty is one of the major causes of gender inequality and that there is a mutually reinforcing "low-level equilibrium trap" between poverty and low levels of female empowerment. Strong external support is needed to break this vicious circle. This paper utilizes the large-scale relocation program for poverty alleviation carried out during the 13th Five-Year Plan period as a quasi-natural experiment, and tries to answer the important question of whether major national poverty alleviation programs can promote the empowerment of poor women in development economics.

The authors' team explores the impact of poverty alleviation relocation on the relative bargaining power of married women within the household, based on research data from farm households in 16 relocation counties in eight provinces in 2019 and 2021. Benchmark regression results show that married women in relocated households have significantly higher relative bargaining power within the household compared to non-relocated households. To address the endogenous challenges of reverse causation and self-selection at the time of household relocation, the article uses an instrumental variables approach. The results of the decomposition of bargaining power indicate that the increase in women's relative bargaining power is mainly in their education of their children and their participation in social events (e.g., weddings, funerals, etc.). In terms of mechanism analysis, the article tests four hypotheses: female income autonomy, property rights, micro-credit accessibility, and time allocation, and finds that land-based poverty alleviation and relocation objectively promotes the improvement of women's relative bargaining power within the household, mainly by enhancing women's income autonomy and loosening the link between the household and the land.

Although the social status of Chinese women has made remarkable progress in many aspects in recent years, rural women in China, especially those in poverty-stricken areas, are still in a disadvantaged position.In 2020, China's battle against poverty achieved a comprehensive victory, realizing the elimination of nearly 100 million poor people, of which women accounted for about half. The research in this paper shows that poverty alleviation programs that take the family as the basic unit of poverty alleviation are crucial to the empowerment of poor females, and that economic development not only promotes the improvement of the overall welfare of poor people's families, but also helps to narrow the gender gap.

Yawen Ding, a 2019 Direct PhD student at the School of Modern Agriculture, Peking University, is the first author of this paper, and her supervisor, researcher Xiaobing Wang, is the corresponding author. Alan de Brauw, a senior researcher at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), and Prof. Qiu Huanguang of the School of Agriculture and Rural Development, Renmin University of China, are co-authors of the paper. The research results are financially supported by the Major Program of the National Social Science Foundation of China, the Surface Program of the National Self-Science Foundation of China, the International Cooperation and Exchange Program of the National Self-Science Foundation of China, and the Special Program of the National Self-Science Foundation of China.

Cite source: Yawen Ding, Xiaobing Wang*, Alan de Brauw, Huanguang Qiu. 2024. Catch up with my husband as I can: Women’s decision-making power consequences of China’s poverty alleviation relocation program. World Development 173, 106433.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2023.106433.

Link: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X23002516