Most poverty research has explored monetary poverty. This paper presents and analyzes the global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) estimations for China. Using China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), we find China's global MPI was 0.035 in 2010 and decreased significantly to 0.017 in 2014. The dimensional composition of MPI suggests that nutrition, education, safe drinking water, and cooking fuel contribute most to overall non-monetary poverty in China. Such analysis is also applied to subgroups, including geographic areas (rural/urban, east/central/west, provinces), as well as social characteristics such as gender of the household head, age, education level, marital status, household size, migration status, ethnicity, and religion. We find the level and composition of poverty differs significantly across certain subgroups. We also find high levels of mismatch between monetary and multidimensional poverty at the household level, which highlights the importance of using both complementary measures to track progress in eradicating poverty.

This paper takes stock of the existing literature on taxation and presents a framework to evaluate the impacts of tax policy reforms from the perspectives of progressivity and social welfare. It applies this framework to examine two tax reforms in China and finds that (i) the abolition of the regressive agricultural tax in 2005 has significantly improved the social welfare of rural residents; (ii) the increase in the income tax thresholds in 2011 increased progressivity but reduced the overall income tax share of total taxation. When the majority of the taxpayers are in the lower tax bracket, progressivity has little real impact in improving income distribution.

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This paper evaluates the minimum living standard guarantee program (Dibao) in rural China using several methods including the income approach, the multidimensional poverty approach, and a proxy means test approach. We find that the targeting accuracy of the program appears greater the more comprehensive the evaluation method used—but all these methods find low levels of targeting accuracy. Because Dibao fund allocation is largely decided by the villagers, who take a more holistic view in selecting “poor” households than the various evaluation methods, we argue that the low targeting effective may be due to the lack of comprehensive evaluation method, as opposed to the low targeting of the program itself. This paper argues that the community-based targeting used by the Dibao program may be a better way to combat poverty in many developing countries, as it requires less administrative capacity and overcomes the difficulties of identifying poor households that qualify for assistance.