Another Inquiry on the Economic Welfare and Poverty in China
The trade-off between economic growth and redistribution has become one of the major notes concerning the emerging economies of post-Cold War world. Adding to this struggle the urge to integrate into the international system while keeping the balances right at home has been another macro-level concern. In conjunction such liabilities not only necessitates the examination of fiscal and structural reforms but also the international trends as well within an historical framing. For that matter the case of China is fascinating in terms of blending these elements of economic and political changes in the last 30 years. However this attempt is not without a cost. This paper aims to
Besides a chronic and irreversible unemployment problem would cost so much in the long run to achieve a good pace of growth again.
In that respect China does not have the favorable conditions of a post-socialist system which provided her the initial advantages of rapid economic growth. “Letting the few get rich first” is not a good policy to pursue today. That’s why the Chinese leadership envisions another path to economic power: growth with redistribution. This change certainly justifies the international consensus of 1970s on growth with redistribution since growth alone is not sustainable in the long run .
The problem of poverty first arose as a rural problem in China . The corruption of the local authorities and the anti-migration policies of the state left the rural poor without protection. The government officials intervene to this trend in the early 1990s by launching anti-poverty programs. However as Fulong Wu & Ningying Huang argues the economic growth was more of help to those in comparison to the help they could get from these programs. In the second half of the 1990s the poverty problem spread to the urban population. With migration permitted the number of the urban poor began to increase .
The urban poor consist of five major groups under poverty line: the people who get support from Ministry of Civil Affairs; the unemployed; the poor employees, laid-off workers, pensioners and the early retirees; people who are unemployed