Du Zhixiong and Zhan Lin: Difficulties and Solutions for Implementing the New Strategy of Precision Poverty Alleviation

Over the past 30 years of reform and opening up, China's poverty alleviation work has made remarkable achievements, realizing the transformation from universal poverty and regional poverty to basically solving poverty. The number of poor people has decreased by 0.67 billion compared with 1978, becoming the first country in the world to achieve the United Nations Millennium Development goal of halving the poverty population. However, our country still faces an arduous task of poverty alleviation. The latest data show that there are still 70.71 million poor people in rural areas in China by 2014, and the problem of lagging development in poor areas has not been fundamentally changed. At present, there are only five years to achieve a well-off society in 2020, and poverty alleviation is very urgent. According to the changes in the situation, it is an important task and a major responsibility for our country to adjust the poverty alleviation strategy in a timely manner and effectively achieve "real poverty alleviation and real poverty alleviation.

The Great Significance of the Adjustment of China's Poverty Alleviation Strategy

(I) poverty reduction encounters "the hardest bone"

after poverty alleviation and development in the first decade of the 21st century, the number of poor people in China has been further reduced, and the problems of production, food and clothing for rural residents have been basically solved. However, the task of poverty reduction in China is still arduous, and the situation of poverty reduction is more complicated. The poverty reduction policies previously issued have basically achieved the task of poverty alleviation in areas with slightly better conditions. Most of the remaining poor people are distributed in Dashi mountainous areas with poor living conditions, lack of water and soil, weak infrastructure, frequent natural disasters, and lagging social development., Border areas, ethnic minority settlements and reservoir immigration areas, deep poverty, weak self-development capabilities, it is the most difficult "hard bone" to achieve China's millennium poverty alleviation goals and well-off goals ". Under the new normal, my country's economic growth has changed from high-speed to medium-high speed. At the same time, it is necessary to change the mode, adjust the structure, reduce and eliminate some excess and backward production capacity, and achieve sustainable development. This process will involve finance, employment and other areas closely related to poverty alleviation, and will also pose certain challenges to poverty alleviation. my country's poverty alleviation and development work has entered a sprint period of "gnawing hard bones and tackling tough problems.

(II) Realize the Remaining Poor People Out of Poverty Need to Adjust Thinking and Strategy

with the economic and social development and the change of poverty reduction situation, China's rural poverty governance has experienced a phased evolution of rural economic system reform, poverty-stricken counties as the focus, and poverty-stricken villages as the focus. Before the reform and opening up, my country's rural areas were in a state of widespread poverty. The first stage of poverty alleviation work began in the late 1970 s. The party and the state shifted their focus to economic construction, empowering the majority of poor farmers and providing market participation opportunities. In the early stage of reform and opening up, my country implemented a poverty governance policy system that focused on institutional reforms to promote poverty reduction and supplemented by relief. Poverty alleviation resources effectively "identify" those areas with development potential and rural poor people with development capacity, so that these areas and poor people can quickly seize development opportunities and get rid of poverty in a short period of time after obtaining the right to development.

By the mid-1980s, the marginal benefits of rural economic system reform on poverty reduction declined, inequality and polarization between the rich and the poor began to appear, and the original poverty governance system was facing challenges. In order to improve the targeting accuracy of poverty alleviation resources, since 1986, the state has carried out a series of institutional innovations in rural poverty governance, gradually established a development-oriented poverty alleviation governance structure with public governance as the main body, changed the targeting mode of poverty alleviation and development, established a targeting mechanism with counties as the object, and identified 370 national poverty counties in 1988 (adjusted to 592 when the National 87 Poverty Alleviation Plan was formulated in 1994), tilt 70% of poverty alleviation resources (gold) to poor counties. By the end of 2000, the number of poor people in rural areas who had not yet solved the problem of food and clothing had decreased from 0.125 billion in 1985 to 30 million in 2000, and the incidence of rural poverty had dropped from 14.8 per cent to about 3 per cent.

In the 21st century, with the continuous reduction of the scale of poverty in China, the distribution of the rural poor population shows the new characteristics of "large dispersion and small concentration. The distribution of the poor population has been concentrated from the former key counties for poverty alleviation and development to the lower-level village-level communities. In response to the poverty problem in the new era, in 2001, the state began to implement a village-level targeting mechanism for poverty alleviation resources, and identified 148100 poverty-stricken villages across the country as the focus of poverty alleviation work, emphasizing the village as a unit to mobilize farmers' participation in the comprehensive development of rural poverty alleviation. These key villages account for 21% of the total number of administrative villages in the country, distributed in 1861 counties (districts and cities) across the country, covering 80% of the country's rural poor. The "whole village to promote poverty alleviation work" has been carried out nationwide, and my country's poverty governance has entered the targeting stage focusing on village-level targeting. At this stage, rural poverty governance constructed a "one body and two wings" poverty alleviation and development strategy, that is, with the promotion of the whole village as the main body, industrialized poverty alleviation and labor transfer training as the "two wings", and achieved better poverty reduction results. The proportion of the rural population in the rural population dropped from 10.2 in 2000 to 2.8 in 2010.

In the crucial period of building a moderately prosperous society in an all-round way, China's poverty alleviation and development work has entered a new stage of consolidating the achievements of food and clothing, speeding up poverty alleviation and becoming rich, improving the ecological environment, improving development capacity and narrowing the development gap. With the change in the distribution characteristics of poverty alleviation targets, that is, the distribution characteristics of the flower arrangement of the poor population under the old poverty alleviation standard have been replaced to a considerable extent by the distribution characteristics of the poor population under the new standard (I. e. concentrated contiguous areas with special difficulties). The causes of poverty have become more complicated and the poverty problems are very different. In the past, the practice of "one move works" and "multiple birds with one stone" has been difficult. The "hard bones" need to be targeted at poverty alleviation resources from the regional level beyond the poverty-stricken counties, so as to cope with the overall poverty of contiguous poverty-stricken areas (such as poor transportation backbone network, etc.) and narrow the regional development gap; on the other hand, poverty alleviation resources need to be further sunk to the individual level (poor households), so as to eliminate the absolute poor population and realize the overall well-off society in poverty-stricken areas.

The proposal of (III) "precise poverty alleviation"

for a long time, there have been some problems in China's poverty alleviation and development work, such as the number of poor population is unclear, the situation is not clear, the pertinence is not strong, and the poverty alleviation funds and project orientation are not accurate. Although the poverty population data obtained from the household sample survey of the National Bureau of Statistics are scientific, they cannot implement targeted poverty alleviation measures because they fail to fully reflect the existence of poor people and the causes of poverty. Based on the reflection on the past poverty alleviation work, in November 2013, when General Secretary Xi Jinping investigated the poverty alleviation work in Xiangxi, he made it clear that the poverty alleviation work "should be planned scientifically, adjust measures to local conditions, grasp the key points, and constantly improve the accuracy, effectiveness and sustainability", and put forward the concept of "accurate poverty alleviation" for the first time. At a new starting point, in accordance with the principles of county as a unit, scale control, hierarchical responsibility, precise identification, and dynamic management, file and establish a national poverty alleviation information network system for each poor village and poor household, and promote special poverty alleviation and poverty at a high level. The identification is connected, the causes of poverty are analyzed in depth, assistance measures are formulated from village to household, and support is concentrated. On June 18, 2015, at a symposium held by the main responsible comrades of the party committees of some provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities in Guizhou, the general secretary proposed "six precisions" on intensifying efforts to promote poverty alleviation and development, namely, "objects must be precise, project arrangements must be precise, The use of funds must be precise, the measures in place must be precise, the village must be precise, and the effect of poverty alleviation must be precise." It further enriches the connotation and operability.

Three Main Problems in the Strategic Adjustment of "Precision Poverty Alleviation"

targeted poverty alleviation is intended to guide the optimal allocation of various poverty alleviation resources through precise identification, precise assistance, precise management and precise assessment of poor households and poor villages, so as to achieve poverty alleviation from village to household, I .e. through "targeted therapy", targeted poverty alleviation is targeted and absolute poverty is targeted. Although the targeted poverty alleviation work has become increasingly institutionalized since the beginning of 2014, it is undeniable that in the actual process of implementing targeted poverty alleviation, the phenomenon of "off-target" is still very prominent, and the implementation of new poverty alleviation strategies and targeted poverty alleviation work are still facing greater challenges. challenge.

Accurate identification of the (I) poor is the primary problem

the premise of precise poverty alleviation is to determine who is the object of poverty alleviation, but there are some problems in the method and process of determining the object. The first is the problem of "scale exclusion" of the poor. The state uses the annual income of 2300 yuan as the poverty standard, and implements "scale control" on a county-by-county basis, that is, the scale of poverty is determined by the percentage of income statistics. For example, if the average income of the whole province is 10% lower than that of 2300 yuan, then the poor objects will be selected according to 10% of the population in the rural areas under the county management. In other words, the poor are not counted according to their heads, but are "made" in proportion. In this pattern, the indicators (number) of poor villages and poor households obtained by various localities (cities, prefectures), counties and townships (towns) may not be consistent with the actual size of the poor population.

The second is the problem of "regional exclusion" of the poor. In 2014, China divided 11 concentrated and contiguous areas with special difficulties, together with the three prefectures (Tibet, Tibetan areas in four provinces and southern Xinjiang) that have clearly implemented special support policies, a total of 14 areas are the main battlefield for poverty alleviation in the new stage. however, this "centralized and contiguous poverty alleviation and development policy" objectively excludes some "flower-arranging" poor villages (households) from the scope of accurate identification, it even leads to the phenomenon of "contiguous for the sake of contiguous", that is, in order to highlight the effectiveness of centralized contiguous poverty alleviation and development, some local governments often integrate nearby poverty-stricken areas as concentrated contiguous poverty alleviation and development areas on the basis of non-poverty-stricken areas or even relatively wealthy areas. And exclude the real or even a large number of poor villages.

In addition, the problems of "misknowledge" and "missing knowledge" caused by the poverty alleviation staff's good relatives and friends and work mistakes are even more serious.

(II) targeted personalized precise assistance is the second major problem

due to different causes of poverty, poor households have different needs for assistance content, and targeted poverty alleviation measures should be provided for specific situations. However, from a practical point of view, although the concept of poverty alleviation based on household conditions is valuable, it is difficult to realize, and the following problems have evolved:

first, poverty reduction measures are simplified. In practice, in order to reduce the intensity of work, many poverty reduction measures have been simplified to provide part of the funds, give away some means of production, build or renovate housing for poor groups, or even just provide some daily necessities, which directly affects the poverty reduction effect and sustainability of the project.

Second, the threshold requires "crowding out" the absolute poor. Some poverty reduction projects have threshold requirements and require local governments to carry out matching funds first. In order not to give up the projects, some local governments adopt virtual matching or misappropriate other resources, thus reducing poverty reduction funds (resources) in other communities. However, some poverty alleviation projects are carried out through the establishment of cooperatives, requiring the poverty alleviation targets who join the cooperatives to match a certain amount of funds, land and other means of production. Some absolute poor people have to choose to give up because they cannot afford it.

Third, poverty alleviation projects do not match the needs of poverty. In the process of implementing accurate poverty alleviation, many provinces and cities adhere to the "two 70%" policy, that is, 70% of the financial poverty alleviation funds should be used for industrial development, and 70% of the specific use of industrial development project funds should be directly sent to households. However, compared with industrial development, some extremely poor areas have more urgent needs for production and living facilities such as ditches, canals, roads, and water, resulting in serious deviations in the allocation of poverty reduction resources; some industrial poverty alleviation projects even completely deviate from the law of industrial development and only Focus on production links and ignore marketing, further destroying the already fragile local industrial foundation.

(III) precise management to improve the efficiency of poverty alleviation is the third problem

precision management means timely tracking and monitoring of poverty alleviation measures and implementation effects, and dynamic adjustment of poverty alleviation targets. However, the current situation of poverty alleviation is far different from that of the past, with the dot distribution of the poor, the complexity of the causes of poverty and the uncertainty of various return to poverty, and the single vertical poverty alleviation management mainly adopted in China is difficult to improve efficiency, which makes the dynamic identification of the poor population on an annual cycle in the new regulations face high implementation costs. At present, the average cost of identifying a poor household is about 30 yuan. It takes one month to complete the identification of a township, and the total cost is about 10000 yuan. In 592 contiguous counties with special difficulties in the country, the annual expenditure alone is close to 60 million yuan. At the same time, in the development of poverty alleviation projects, most of the poor people only passively invest in work, and their subjective initiative and development decision-making power have not been paid enough attention and excavated, resulting in the lack of effective mass supervision in the implementation and management of poverty alleviation projects. as a result, the government-led poverty alleviation management is facing difficulties, which can easily lead to short-term poverty alleviation behavior and waste of poverty alleviation resources.

Opinions and Suggestions on the Implementation of Precise Poverty Alleviation Strategy

(I) the way to identify the poor

as a comprehensive system, poverty identification includes multiple indicators such as unemployment rate and poverty rate. However, China still takes the income poverty line in a certain region as the fundamental basis, which has become an important constraint to carry out "accurate identification. Therefore, it is necessary to amend the current way of identifying poverty in accordance with the scale and region of our machinery. On the basis of the country's existing top-down measurement of the size of the poor population, it is necessary to build a bottom-up poverty group identification and participation system to revise and determine the size of the poor population; while focusing on concentrated and contiguous poverty alleviation and development, the poor outside the area The group adopts a non-discriminatory poverty reduction policy to ensure that the poor groups inside and outside the area are not only identified, but also receive precise assistance.

Secondly, the identification method of "high accuracy, easy operation and low cost" is summarized. In the identification of poor households, in order to more realistically monitor the changes in the poor population, the government should take administrative costs into consideration on the basis of targeting benefits, and summarize more "four views" identification experience such as Weining County, Guizhou Province, namely "one look at the house, two look at the grain, three look at the labor force is not strong, four look at whether there is a scholar at home" and other simple and easy ways to ensure accurate identification of the greatest extent. "Looking at the house" here is to estimate the poverty level of farmers by looking at their living conditions and living environment; "looking at grain" is to estimate their agricultural income and food expenditure by looking at their land conditions and production conditions; "looking at whether the labor force is strong or not" is to estimate their labor income and medical expenditure by looking at the labor situation of farmers and whether there are sick and disabled people; "to see if there is a scholar at home", it is to estimate the development potential and education expenditure of farmers by looking at their education level and the current situation of students in school.

Third, the gradual implementation of "participatory" horizontal identification. Residents living in the same rural areas know best "who is the real poor". Therefore, public evaluation and comparison can be carried out within the rural community, and the poverty alleviation target can be finally determined through democratic evaluation, object mapping and publicity by farmers themselves or collective selection. The management of the poor adopts a hierarchical management responsibility system for village management, township management of villages, and county (district) management of townships. In particular, the township level must strengthen policy convergence, and promptly list the people returning to poverty as poverty alleviation targets, so as to achieve "in and out, dynamic management".

(II) Explore More Practical and Precise Poverty Alleviation Paths

in connection with my country's current poverty alleviation situation, it is necessary to actively explore more direct and effective poverty alleviation methods that are in line with local reality, and focus on strengthening the development of "four batches" according to different causes of poverty. The first is to develop a group of poor people who have the ability to work and can be lifted out of poverty through production and work by supporting production and employment, focusing on industrial support and employment assistance, and developing regional characteristic industries with high participation in accordance with local conditions. Expand employment training and employment docking services; the second is to relocate a group of poor people who "one side of the soil and water cannot support one side of the people" through immigration and relocation, the focus of poverty alleviation is on the implementation of "relocation", and these poor people are relocated to areas with better development conditions, so as to protect the ecological environment and fundamentally solve their livelihood problems; the third is to adopt the minimum living guarantee policy., To cover a group of poor people who have lost their ability to work and cannot be helped out of poverty through industrial support and employment; fourth, through medical assistance, we will support a group of temporarily poor people who have become poor due to illness and return to poverty due to illness, focus on solving the problem of medical expenses they face, help them recover as soon as possible, and, if necessary, provide follow-up support for the development of production and employment.

In order to clarify the task of poverty alleviation and the time limit for completion, and to achieve the goal of lifting the 70.17 million rural poor out of poverty as scheduled in 2020, it is necessary to carry out wall chart operations on all 592 key counties in the national poverty alleviation and development work, and formulate "construction drawings", "schedule" and "work accounts". According to different assistance needs, the work process, target tasks, assistance measures, and the list of assistance cadres are all publicized on the wall to clarify the work tasks and completion time limit. While doing a good job in the overall planning of the area and the annual promotion plan, each county and district will focus on some poverty-stricken areas every year. The task of tackling key problems in each poverty-stricken area will be completed in three stages: 2015-2017 will be a concentrated attack, 2018-2019 will be a consolidation and improvement, and absolute poverty will be completely eliminated by 2020.

On the basis of determining the precise poverty alleviation path and work progress, four aspects of responsibility need to be implemented to encourage multi-party participation in poverty alleviation and development. The first is to implement the investigation, deployment and coordination responsibilities of the party and government responsible persons as the first responsible person for poverty alleviation and development; the second is to implement the main responsibility of poverty-stricken counties that must focus on poverty alleviation and development; the third is to implement the central department to promote poverty The development environment of the region is the responsibility of providing sufficient financial support; the fourth is to implement the common responsibility of all aspects of society, including party and government agencies and other units to assume the responsibility for designated poverty alleviation tasks, the poverty alleviation responsibility of developed areas to backward areas, the back-feeding responsibility of industrial capital to agriculture, etc., and in the process of implementing the poverty alleviation responsibility of social capital, special emphasis needs to be placed on the participation and profit model of poor households, and poor households cannot be reduced to simple raw materials. provider.

(III) Establish and Improve a More Efficient and Targeted Poverty Alleviation Management System

to improve the precise poverty alleviation management system, we must first work on the "exit mechanism for poverty alleviation targets" to achieve precise poverty alleviation. Through the establishment of a working mechanism for poor households to get rid of poverty and the withdrawal of poor villages and counties, strict withdrawal procedures and standards, and dynamic management of poverty alleviation targets, so as to achieve "entry and exit". Taking the number of poverty reduction population, the increase of income of the poor, the improvement of production and living conditions, the level of public service, the construction of ecological environment, and the current situation of social security as the main assessment indicators, based on the provincial indicators, the municipal poverty alleviation leading group will formulate specific quantitative indicators and assessment methods according to the characteristics of each poverty-stricken county and district. After the end of the assessment period, counties and districts that have completed the task of poverty alleviation can continue to enjoy relevant preferential policies; the "one-vote veto" can be implemented for counties and districts that have not been completed ". In turn, it will form a policy orientation for poor counties that "it is good to take off the hat early, and there are still constraints if you don't take off the hat.

Secondly, it is necessary to build a social poverty alleviation service platform as soon as possible to promote the "socialization" of poverty alleviation ". At present, the approval authority for poverty alleviation projects has been delegated to the counties, and the provincial and municipal poverty alleviation departments are guiding and supervising. However, in order to change the current situation of high regulatory costs due to the deep involvement of local governments in micro-poverty alleviation activities, and to improve the transparency of poverty alleviation work and the efficiency and sustainability of poverty alleviation projects, it is necessary to build a social poverty alleviation service platform that integrates organizational personnel, dissemination of information and integration of funds on the basis of the existing 12317 poverty alleviation supervision and reporting telephone work. Among them, the function of organizing personnel is connected with the strength of social organizations in poverty alleviation voluntary service, and under the guidance of the government, participates in the targeted poverty alleviation cause for specific poor groups; the information dissemination function is connected with the work results of the poor population's filing and card filing, and timely releases the poverty alleviation demand and resource supply information, promotes the benign interaction of social poverty alleviation resources, and promotes the dynamic management of the poor; the fund integration function is connected with the poverty alleviation foundation, the design of public offering projects can not only expand the financing channels of poverty alleviation projects, but also improve the management efficiency of poverty alleviation funds.

Third, the comprehensive use of financial instruments and means. Effective financial poverty alleviation measures will be an important force for poverty alleviation in the new era. In this regard, we should vigorously implement the targeted poverty alleviation micro-loan project, and strive to make all poor households with labor ability, loan willingness and certain repayment ability by the end of 2017. Get mortgage-free, guarantee-free, less than 50000 yuan (including 50000 yuan), and small credit loans within 3 years to solve the problem of difficult and expensive loans for the poor. Encourage all kinds of financial institutions to township, poverty-stricken villages to set up service outlets. Establish a risk compensation fund for poor households, and strive to achieve a loan risk compensation fund of more than 10 million yuan in each county by 2017. Integrate all kinds of financial to household discount policies, and the government will fully discount interest on poverty alleviation micro-credit loans for poor households at the benchmark interest rate. Loans to poor households are settled and discounted on an annual basis, with a maximum discount period of three years. We will step up efforts to establish mutual aid funds for poverty alleviation in poor villages, strive to achieve full coverage of village-level mutual aid funds in all poor villages by 2020, and make the scale of mutual aid funds in each poor village not less than 200000 yuan through provincial, municipal and county poverty alleviation fund subsidies and social assistance.

Source: China Development Watch | Time: August 26, 2015 | Editor: Zhai Tianchang