Impacts of poverty eradication on carbon neutrality in China.

China is facing challenges to tackle the threat of climate change while reducing social inequality. Poverty eradication requires improvement in the living conditions of low-income households, which leads in turn to higher carbon footprints and may undermine the efforts of climate change mitigation. Previous studies have assessed the climate impacts of poverty eradication, but few have quantified how the additional carbon emissions of poverty eradication are shared at the subnational level in China and the impact on China's climate targets. We investigated the recent trend of carbon footprint inequality in China's provinces and estimated the climate burden of different poverty reduction schemes, measured by increased carbon emissions. The results indicate that poverty eradication will not impede the achievement of national climate targets, with an average annual household carbon footprint increase of 0.1%-1.2%. However, the carbon emissions growth in less developed provinces can be 4.0%, five times that in wealthy regions. Less developed regions suffer a greater climate burden because of poverty eradication, which may offset carbon reduction efforts. Therefore, interregional collaboration is needed to coordinate inequality reduction with investments in low-carbon trajectories in all provinces.

Ending extreme poverty has a negligible impact on global greenhouse gas emissions.

Growing consumption is both necessary to end extreme poverty1and one of the main drivers of greenhouse gas emissions2, creating a potential tension between alleviating poverty and limiting global warming. Most poverty reduction has historically occurred because of economic growth3-6, which means that reducing poverty entails increasing not only the consumption of people living in poverty but also the consumption of people with a higher income. Here we estimate the emissions associated with the economic growth needed to alleviate extreme poverty using the international poverty line of US $2.15 per day (ref. 7). Even with historical energy- and carbon-intensity patterns, the global emissions increase associated with alleviating extreme poverty is modest, at 2.37 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per year or 4.9% of 2019 global emissions. Lower inequality, higher energy efficiency and decarbonization of energy can ease this tension further: assuming the best historical performance, the emissions for poverty alleviation in 2050 will be reduced by 90%. More ambitious poverty lines require more economic growth in more countries, which leads to notably higher emissions. The challenge to align the development and climate objectives of the world is not in reconciling extreme poverty alleviation with climate objectives but in providing sustainable middle-income standards of living.

Estimating the economic and social impact of conditional cash transfers from the Prospera Program in Mexico.

This research analyses the Prospera program's impact on poverty and income distribution through a computable general equilibrium model. It concludes that transfers to households have a positive impact on the Mexican economy but hide the real problem-the low wage share-that, in the long term, prevents poverty from worsening but does not reduce the population in poverty or inequality. In a scenario without transfers, neither the population in poverty nor the Gini Index decreases significantly. The results obtained lead to an understanding of some of the causes of the high rates of poverty and inequality in Mexico, which in turn have been perpetuated since the economic crisis of 1995. This allows the design of public policies in line with the structural needs of the economy, which combat the problem from the root that generates it, in order to contribute to the reduction of inequality in accordance with the UN Sustainable Development Goal 10.

Chairman's Communist Party of China member status and targeted poverty alleviation: Evidence from China.

Based on the data of Chinese listed private companies from 2016 to 2020, this paper investigates the influence of the Chairman's member status of Communist Party of China (CPC) on targeted poverty alleviation. The research results demonstrate that the Chairman's CPC member status of private companies significantly increases the companies' willingness and the amounts of investment in poverty alleviation. The construction of the CPC organization can strengthen the role of the chairman's Communist Party of China member status in promoting targeted poverty alleviation. The conclusions are still valid through robustness tests, such as substituting dependent variables, adjusting the sample range, and PSM-paired samples. In addition, the Impact Threshold for a Confounding Variable is used to deal with endogenous problems.

The effects of cash transfers on adult and child mortality in low- and middle-income countries.

Poverty is an important social determinant of health that is associated with increased risk of death1-5. Cash transfer programmes provide non-contributory monetary transfers to individuals or households, with or without behavioural conditions such as children's school attendance6,7. Over recent decades, cash transfer programmes have emerged as central components of poverty reduction strategies of many governments in low- and middle-income countries6,7. The effects of these programmes on adult and child mortality rates remains an important gap in the literature, however, with existing evidence limited to a few specific conditional cash transfer programmes, primarily in Latin America8-14. Here we evaluated the effects of large-scale, government-led cash transfer programmes on all-cause adult and child mortality using individual-level longitudinal mortality datasets from many low- and middle-income countries. We found that cash transfer programmes were associated with significant reductions in mortality among children under five years of age and women. Secondary heterogeneity analyses suggested similar effects for conditional and unconditional programmes, and larger effects for programmes that covered a larger share of the population and provided larger transfer amounts, and in countries with lower health expenditures, lower baseline life expectancy, and higher perceived regulatory quality. Our findings support the use of anti-poverty programmes such as cash transfers, which many countries have introduced or expanded during the COVID-19 pandemic, to improve population health.

Research on the long tail mechanism of digital finance alleviating the relative poverty of rural households.

Digital finance provides a long-tail mechanism for alleviating relative poverty caused by unequal opportunities and rights. According to the inference of an improved Cobb-Douglas production function and Ramsey-Cass-Koopmans two-stage household consumption model, the long-tail mechanism for digital finance to alleviate the relative poverty of farmers includes productive investment mechanism, credit mechanism, financial asset allocation and entrepreneurial mechanism. An empirical analysis of 11,519 rural households across China based on CHFS2019 data shows that digital finance can significantly and steadily alleviate relative poverty by improving credit availability and promoting household entrepreneurship, while its effect on increasing productive investment opportunities and optimizing financial asset allocation is less certain. Therefore, it is necessary to continue to improve the "blood making" long tail mechanism of digital finance for farmers' credit and innovation and entrepreneurship, and at the same time guide the digital finance to empower the development of rural industries to increase farmers' productive investment opportunities, cultivate endogenous growth momentum, and improve the wealth allocation function of rural digital financial market.

Financial and social efficiency of microcredit programs of partner organizations of Pakistan Poverty Alleviation Fund.

This paper examines the financial and social efficiency of the microcredit programs offered by the Pakistan Poverty Alleviation Fund partner organizations. Panel data concerning variables of interest are collected from Pakistan Microfinance Network, covering a minimum of 14 partner organizations (in 2005) to a maximum of 35 partner organizations (in 2014). The data is analyzed using the Data Envelopment Analysis, assuming both constant and variable returns to scale scenarios and the operational scale of the partner organizations. Trends in average efficiency scores have been analyzed to assess the mission drift of the partner organizations. Results reveal that managerial inefficiency is more pronounced than the sub-optimal production scale in all three scenarios under consideration. Moreover, trends in the efficiency scores indicated a slight mission drift of the microfinance providers. About 77.5% of the partner organizations were financially sustainable over the entire study period. The study recommends providing objective-oriented training, workshops, and seminars for managing microfinance providers.

Tackling psychosocial and capital constraints to alleviate poverty.

Many policies attempt to help extremely poor households build sustainable sources of income. Although economic interventions have predominated historically1,2, psychosocial support has attracted substantial interest3-5, particularly for its potential cost-effectiveness. Recent evidence has shown that multi-faceted 'graduation' programmes can succeed in generating sustained changes6,7. Here we show that a multi-faceted intervention can open pathways out of extreme poverty by relaxing capital and psychosocial constraints. We conducted a four-arm randomized evaluation among extremely poor female beneficiaries already enrolled in a national cash transfer government programme in Niger. The three treatment arms included group savings promotion, coaching and entrepreneurship training, and then added either a lump-sum cash grant, psychosocial interventions, or both the cash grant and psychosocial interventions. All three arms generated positive effects on economic outcomes and psychosocial well-being, but there were notable differences in the pathways and the timing of effects. Overall, the arms with psychosocial interventions were the most cost-effective, highlighting the value of including well-designed psychosocial components in government-led multi-faceted interventions for the extreme poor.

Poverty reduction in rural China: Does the digital finance matter?

As digital finance is widely spread and applied in China, this new format of financial technology could become a new way to reduce poverty in rural areas. By matching digital financial indexes of the prefectural-level cities with microdata on rural households from the China Household Finance Survey (CHFS) in 2017, we find that digital finance significantly suppresses absolute poverty and relative poverty among rural households in China, which is supported by a series of robustness tests, such as the instrumental variable approach, using alternative specifications, and excluding extreme observations. Additionally, we provide evidence that the poverty reduction effect of digital finance is likely to be explained by alleviating credit constraints and information constraints, broadening social networks, and promoting entrepreneurship. Our findings further complement the research field on financial poverty reduction and offer insights for the development of public financial policies of poverty reduction in other countries, especially in some developing countries.

Impact of poverty reduction on access to water and sanitation in low- and lower-middle-income countries: country-specific Bayesian projections to 2030.

BACKGROUND: In 2017, 785 million people globally lacked access to basic services of drinking water and 2 billion people lived without basic sanitation services. Most of these people live in low- and lower-middle-income countries in South Asia, Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. To monitor the progress towards universal access to water and sanitation, this study aimed to predict the coverage of access to basic drinking water supply and sanitation (WSS) services as well as the reduction in the practice of open defecation by 2030, under two assumptions: following the current trends and accelerated poverty reduction. METHODS AND FINDINGS: Households reporting access to basic WSS services and those practising open defecation were extracted from 210 nationally representative Demographic Health Surveys and Multiple Cluster Indicator Surveys (1994-2016) from 51 countries. A Bayesian hierarchical mixed effect linear regression model was developed to predict the indicators in 2030 at national, urban-rural and wealth-specific levels. A Bayesian regression model with accelerated reduction in poverty by 2030 was applied to assess the impact of poverty reduction on these indicators. Out of 51 countries, only nine (Bangladesh, Bhutan, Ghana, India, Nepal, Pakistan, The Philippines, Togo and Vietnam) were predicted to reach over 90% coverage in access to basic services of drinking water by 2030. However, none of the countries were projected to achieve equivalent coverage for access to basic sanitation services. By 2030, 21 countries were projected to achieve the target of less than 10% households practising open defecation. Urban-rural and wealth-derived disparities in access to basic WSS services, especially sanitation, were more pronounced in sub-Saharan Africa than South Asia and Southeast Asia. Access to basic sanitation services was projected to benefit more from poverty reduction than access to basic drinking water services. Households residing in rural settings were predicted to receive greater benefit from poverty reduction than urban populations in access to both basic WSS services. CONCLUSION: Achieving poverty eradication targets may have a substantial positive impact on access to basic water supply and sanitation services. However, many low- and lower-middle-income countries will struggle to achieve the goal of universal access to basic services, especially in the sanitation sector.

A One Health Approach to Child Stunting: Evidence and Research Agenda.

Stunting (low height for age) affects approximately one-quarter of children aged < 5 years worldwide. Given the limited impact of current interventions for stunting, new multisectoral evidence-based approaches are needed to decrease the burden of stunting in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Recognizing that the health of people, animals, and the environment are connected, we present the rationale and research agenda for considering a One Health approach to child stunting. We contend that a One Health strategy may uncover new approaches to tackling child stunting by addressing several interdependent factors that prevent children from thriving in LMICs, and that coordinated interventions among human health, animal health, and environmental health sectors may have a synergistic effect in stunting reduction.

Towards poverty alleviation in developing countries: An empirical study of the impact of land tenure reforms in Kati, Mali.

Post-colonial land tenure reforms in emerging countries have partly aimed at poverty reduction through equitable land access. However, the poverty rate keeps rising in rural and peri-urban settings in Sub-Saharan Africa dominated by agricultural activities. This article reviews land tenure reforms in Mali, from the year 2000 to 2017 regarding poverty alleviation and evaluates their impacts on indigenous smallholder farmers, using multiple linear and logistic regression models and local experts' elicitations. The results indicate that the advent of land titles as the only definitive evidence of land ownership, following the reforms, has generally weakened customary land management. Smallholder farmers face several barriers to obtaining land titles, limiting equity in land access and security. This has paved way for land markets marred by irregularities and resulted in colossal loss of agricultural lands, which are the main source of rural livelihood. Thus, the reforms have not yielded the intended poverty reduction outcomes. The study recommends that land transfers must be authorised by a single institution, represented at the various administrative levels, which issues an authentic and incorruptible document using appropriate technology. Moreover, since pro-poor provisions in the reforms usually lack implementing decrees in Mali, political will is key to achieving equitable land access and security.