Targeted poverty reduction under new structure

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of social capital on the mental health of older adults in rural China. The authors also examine potential heterogeneous effects and two possible pathways from social capital increase to mental health improvement. Design/methodology/approach Based on a panel data of China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study, this paper employs a fixed effect model to examine the impact of social capital on health. A two-stage instrumental variable approach is adopted to alleviate the issue of endogeneity. Findings Results demonstrate that social capital has improved the mental health of older adults in rural China significantly. The beneficial effect is stronger for female, people with lower income, aged people and mainly observed in the central and western regions. Social capital affects the mental health of rural older adults through raising the awareness of healthy behavior and lowering the searching cost of health-related information. Practical implications Social capital plays a vital role in improving the mental health of older adults in rural China and is necessary for the construction of beautiful countryside in China. The authority should increase the investment in both the hard and soft infrastructure to improve the mental health of rural residents and narrow the inequality in health status. Originality/value This study enriches the empirical literature on the relationship between social capital and mental health by providing new evidence from China. Also, we choose the social activities and communications of individuals to construct a standardized index for social capital, which can better capture the social capital at the individual level.

Effect of Land Expropriation on Land-Lost Farmers’ Health: Empirical Evidence from Rural China

“…Due to the lack of data, a self-reported health variable can be used to measure health status in the present study. However, numerous studies have confirmed the validity and rationality of such self-reported health variables [8,13,14,31,32,33,34,35,36,37]. Second, this study examined only the income and psychological effects, but neglected other potential explanations at the societal or community level.…”

“…[6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14]. At the micro level, age, gender, educational level, marital status, environmental quality, water quality, sanitation level, income level and religious beliefs all have an impact on the health of rural residents [11,12,13,14,15,16,17]. At the macro level, health expenditure in rural areas, accessibility of medical services and outflow of rural labor force are closely related to the health of the rural residents [18,19,20].…”

“…But the main advantage of self-reported health is that it can fully reflect the physiological and mental health of individuals. It was widely used in the previous literature and many studies confirmed the rationality of this indicator [8,13,14,31,32,33,34,35,36,37]. This paper also used self-reported health status as the primary health indicator.…”

“…We controlled for other factors that may affect the individual’s health, mainly including gender, age, education level and other family factors such as family size, family income per capita and family housing marketing value [6,7,8,12,13,15,16,31].…”

${}_{\delta}^{\gamma}\!\mathbf{\Phi}$-type inclusion set for eigenvalues of a tensor

“…Moreover, the inclusion relation between γ δ Φ(A) and other eigenvalue inclusion sets is discussed. As an application, a new criterion for identifying nonsingular tensors [14,17] is provided. In order to show the superiority of the new results, numerical examples are given in Section 3.…”