Determinants of Rural Poverty in Remote Mountains of Southeast China from the Household Perspective

Strategies aimed towards poverty alleviation need to identify factors that are strongly associated with poverty. The objective of the study was to analyse the determinants of rural absolute and relative poverty in Shouning County, Fujian Province, Southeast China. Two binary logistic regressions were estimated based on household survey data in which the dependent variables were whether the residents were living in poverty, and the explanatory variables included a set of socioeconomic and demographic variables. The results showed that the age of the household head, dependency ratio, number of chronic patients, pressure of educational expenses, and culture of poverty were significantly and positively associated with the likelihood of being in absolute poverty. However, a greater household size and better accessibility to information decreased the probability of being in this state. The strongest four predictors of absolute poverty in descending order were information accessibility, number of chronic patients, pressure of educational expenses, and culture of poverty. In terms of relative poverty, our results demonstrated that elevation, cropland per capita, age of household head, number of chronic patients, pressure of educational expenses, and distance to the county seat had significant positive relationships with the probability of being trapped in relative poverty, whereas information accessibility was negatively associated with being in relative poverty. The strongest four predictors of relative poverty in descending order were information accessibility, pressure of educational expenses, cropland per capita, and number of chronic patients. Generally, the results confirmed three important determinants of rural poverty hypothesised in previous studies: chronic illness-induced poverty, educational expenses-induced poverty, and culture of poverty. We expect that the results of this study will provide useful insight for future research of rural poverty.