In 2015, the Chinese government initiated the nation-wide Targeted Poverty Alleviation Project, aiming to lift its 55.7 million population out of poverty by the end of 2020. One major approach to achieving this ambitious goal... [ view full abstract ]
In 2015, the Chinese government initiated the nation-wide Targeted Poverty Alleviation Project, aiming to lift its 55.7 million population out of poverty by the end of 2020. One major approach to achieving this ambitious goal is to relocate ten million poor households in resource-scant and ecologically-vulnerable areas to new settlements through subsidies, usually in the form of cash or government-built housing. This is easily the largest government driven relocation in human history.
Among the migration and relocation literature, very little attention has been paid to the subsidized relocation. The goal of this study is to fill the gap by analyzing first-hand data that we have collected from 16 poverty inflicted counties in 8 provinces in China. The panel data were collected in the two-wave survey in 2016 and 2017, and the final sample consists of 7,701 individuals from 1,880 households. Although the subsidy is large and financially attractive, some households are not willing to relocate and some households who relocated moved back. In this study, we attempt to understand the reasons behind the willingness to relocate and why some relocated households moved back.
We will fit two logistic regression models. In the first model, the dependent variable is the willingness towards relocation. In the second model, the dependent variable is whether they moved back or not after relocating. The independent variables include household characteristics (income, educational attainment, marital status, household size, number of children, number of elderly), educational resources (distance to elementary, middle, and high schools), geographical accessibility (distance to paved road and county seat), and living convenience (public water, electricity, distance to the nearest market). This study will contribute new evidence to literature on migration and residential preferences by studying China’s unprecedented subsidized relocation program.
