Rural household income and inequality under the Sloping Land Conversion Program in western China

Abstract

As payment for ecosystem services (PES) programs proliferate globally, assessing their impact upon households’ income and livelihood patterns is critical. The Sloping Land Conversion Program (SLCP) is an exceptional PES program, in terms of its ambitious biophysical and socioeconomic objectives, large geographic scale, numbers of people directly affected, and duration of operation. The SLCP has now operated in the poor mountainous areas in China for 10 y and offers a unique opportunity for policy evaluation. Using survey data on rural households’ livelihoods in the southern mountain area in Zhouzhi County, Shaanxi Province, we carry out a statistical analysis of the effects of PES and other factors on rural household income. We analyze the extent of income inequality and compare the socio-demographic features and household income of households participating in the SLCP with those that did not. Our statistical analysis shows that participation in SLCP has significant positive impacts upon household income, especially for low- and medium-income households; however, participation also has some negative impacts on the low- and medium-income households. Overall, income inequality is less among households participating in the SLCP than among those that do not after 7 y of the PES program. Different income sources have different effects on Gini statistics; in particular, wage income has opposite effects on income inequality for the participating and nonparticipating households. We find, however, that the SLCP has not increased the transfer of labor toward nonfarming activities in the survey site, as the government expected.

Estimation of Rural Households’ Willingness to Accept Two PES Programs and Their Service Valuation in the Miyun Reservoir Catchment, China

“…Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) is an effective policy mechanism that can leverage more external resources to sustain and improve ES via the conversion of non-market values of ES into individual economic incentives [29,30]. Over the last decades, PES programs aimed at improving ES and alleviating poverty are becoming important and thus are undergoing rapid development in both developed and developing countries [31][32][33].…”

Spatial covariance of ecosystem services and poverty in China

“…Ouyang et al 1999Ouyang et al , 2016Chen and Zhang 2000;He et al 2005) as well as case studies examining the impacts of PES on both livelihoods and environmental outcomes (e.g. Cao et al 2010;Li et al 2011;Liu et al 2008;Yang et al 2013aYang et al , 2013b; see also Suich et al 2015). However, to our knowledge, ours is the first analysis to examine the spatial covariation of poverty and ES at the scale of China.…”

The challenge and future of rocky desertification control in karst areas in southwest China

“…Research results of similar ecological restoration projects, such as Sloping Land Conversion Program (SLCP), showed that the SLCP's direct impact on the income of participant households was insignificant. Instead, the increase of household income can be mainly attributed to the significant acceleration of the non-agricultural labour force (Li et al, 2011;Yin et al, 2014;Lin and Yao, 2014). Likewise, rocky desertification control has reduced the demand for agricultural labour and has promoted the transfer of agricultural surplus labour to non-agricultural employment (Xiao et al, 2012), which may have indirectly contributed to an increase of household income.…”