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The purpose of this paper is to assess China’s urban social assistance policy, mainly by examining the findings of in-depth interviews with urban Dibao recipients in Chengdu about their experiences with social assistance, and by comparing what the social assistance offers with the urban poor households’ actual needs and vulnerabilities.

In this study, the author interviewed 15 people from urban Dibao Households in Wuhou District and Qingyang District of Chengdu, China. The interviews were conducted from April to August in 2013, usually in their homes. The small sample naturally limits generalizations, however it can point to directions for future research.

It is found out that urban Dibao which is the core of social assistance policy provides insufficient cash support and other special assistance programs are more of tokenistic which do not offer much help. Besides, due to lack of psychological aid, many recipients show negative and pessimistic attitudes toward life.

Regarding the assessment of social assistance policy in China, the international literature has shown little interest. Several Chinese scholars have analyzed urban social assistance system, but they tend to examine or assess from the perspective of policy makers and focus on making policy suggestions. Thus, there is not much information about whether what the social assistance offers could meet the urban poor households’ actual needs and vulnerabilities. An interesting endeavor would be to explore and assess the urban social assistance policy from the perspective of the recipients, and this is exactly what this paper aims to do.

This paper aims to review the institutional evolution of China's rural social security system in the past 35 years, focusing on major policy transformations of the rural social security system in a large country, and extract the Chinese experience on developing rural social security.

This paper systematically reviews the evolution of rural social security system via organizing policy documents, key events and research literature on the construction of rural social security since the Reform and Opening-up.

First, institutional transformation is a profound change in China's rural social security system; second, policy transformation has taken place in the main areas of China's rural social security system, including rural endowment insurance, medical insurance and social assistance; third, the policy evolution of China's rural social security system has a unique experience in a large country.

China is the country with the largest rural population in the world. The process and experience of transforming the social security system in the vast rural areas of China have important value and reference significance for other developing countries.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the pathways through which social protection policies in China and India can address the key challenges facing poor, vulnerable, and disadvantaged groups under rapid transformation in both countries.

This paper reviews the main social protection policies in China and India and analyzes the challenges that they are facing. This analysis is based on an evaluation of poverty and food security trends in both countries among vulnerable and disadvantaged groups followed by an overview of major experiences and gaps in social protection policies in the two emerging Asian giants.

Improving the coverage and targeting of social protection systems is vital, and will require a multi-faceted reform portfolio that promotes more integrated and horizontally equitable systems. Emphasis should be placed on developing productive, cross-sectoral social protection programs that combine short-term social safety support with long-term tools to enhance productivity, paying special attention to nutrition, health, and human capital development. More efficient coverage and targeting should bridge the rural and urban divide and be grounded in transparent criteria and procedures that govern program implementation at all levels of the government. As both countries become more urbanized, social protection programs need to give equal attention to emerging food insecurity and nutrition issues within urban areas without detracting from food security and nutrition efforts in rural areas.

Faced with a sizable population of undernourished and poor people, India and China have applied rather different approaches to address food insecurity. The originality and value of this paper lie in an in-depth parallel analysis of how China and India can better use their social protection systems to address food insecurity and undernutrition among poor, vulnerable, and disadvantaged groups.

The cities, for the most part, appeared up until the middle of the 1990s to be islands within the larger Chinese political economy in which job-secure workers could be certain that their livelihood, health, education, and living abodes would evermore undergird their and their children's sustenance. At least until the late 1980s, urbanites who stuck with the state sector even considered good treatment on the job a kind of birthright, an entitlement that was sure to be enforced. In the cities, true, there had always been the disadvantaged after 1949 – those without offspring or spouses, the disabled, and people unable to support themselves. But this relatively tiny batch of individuals generally survived in the shadows and out of sight, subsisting – but just barely – as members of the “three withouts” on a mere pittance, in the form of meager “social relief” disbursed by civil affairs departments.⁸

Wellbeing evaluation using ordered categorical response data is hazardous given the scale dependent nature of most measures of wellbeing and inequality. Here, scale independent instruments for measuring levels of wellbeing and inequalities between groups in multidimensional ordered categorical environments are introduced and applied in a study of health and consumption wellbeing and the aging process in twenty‐first century China. Urban/rural location, gender, age and the availability of welfare support were considered circumstances in what is in essence a study of equality of opportunity in the acquisition of health and consumption wellbeing in Chinas’ aging population. Older populations are found to experience diminished and increasingly diverse wellbeing outcomes that are, to some extent, ameliorated by welfare support.

Most poverty research has explored monetary poverty. This chapter 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 heads, 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 first reviews the history of social insurance policy and coverage in urban China, documenting the evolution in the coverage of pensions, medical and unemployment insurance for both local residents and migrants, and highlighting obstacles to expanding coverage. The paper then uses two waves of the China Urban Labor Survey, conducted in 2005 and 2010, to examine the correlates of social insurance participation before and after implementation of the 2008 Labor Contract Law. A higher labor tax wedge is associated with a lower probability that local employed residents participate in social insurance programs, but is not associated with participation of wage-earning migrants, who are more likely to be dissuaded by fragmentation of the social insurance system. The existing gender gap in social insurance coverage is explained by differences in coverage across industrial sectors and firm ownership classes in which men and women work.

China and India are two of the fastest growing economies in the world, and poverty reduction has been substantial in both countries through the past few decades. Yet they have very different profiles in terms of food security and undernutrition – while at the micro-level China has performed well in terms of undernutrition, India has not. The purpose of this paper is to examine linkages between poverty, food security, and undernutrition in both countries.

In this paper, the authors discuss the linkages between poverty, food security, and undernutrition at the micro level, describe the literature, and make inferences for targeting the remaining poor, food insecure, or undernourished in both countries.

In China, there is a need for better tools for targeting the poor or malnourished. In India, more effective state-level policies should be better understood by the central government and disseminated to less successful states.

In this paper, the authors describe data sources on poverty, food security, and undernutrition in both China and India, and correlates with changes in all three. The authors try to understand what factors appear to lead to reductions in all three, pointing out data gaps in both countries.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the impact of unconditional cash transfers in Indonesia on poverty and inequality while, unlike much of the previous literature on the welfare impact of such transfers, acknowledging that they will have both a direct effect and an economy-wide effect on the national economy.

The methodology used is a Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model of the Indonesian economy. The unique feature of this model, which is very relevant in this study, is the disaggregation of households by expenditure classes; this allows for precise estimation of the distributional impact and poverty incidence.

The results suggest that, despite a large reduction in poverty, particularly in rural areas, such transfers reduce the Indonesian GDP, especially if domestically financed through increasing the value added tax of all commodities. However, the GDP reduction can be reduced by approximately half when cash transfers are financed by reducing the distortionary fuel subsidy. Moreover, cash transfers financed by reducing the fuel subsidy also reduce inequality by much more than otherwise. Various extents of the distribution of the transfers are compared, from giving them to the poorest 10 percent to distributing them equally to all households. The benefit of the transfers, in terms of reduced poverty and inequality, is found to be smaller when the author extends the beneficiaries toward the non-poor, although the economy-wide cost, in terms of the reduced GDP, is smaller.

The CGE model used in this model is a comparative-static model that does not explicitly model the time dimension, i.e. how the impact of the transfers evolves over time. This is important if we want to know the timing of the transfers and how and when they are translated into impacts.

To reduce the contractionary effect of cash transfers program, government/policy makers should carefully look for appropriate financing such as from removing subsidy with pre-existing distortions like fuel subsidies.

Government needs to carefully design cash transfers to minimize the negative indirect (economy-wide) implication for the national economy and to make sure that the transfers reach the targeted beneficiaries.

Few previous studies have acknowledged the indirect economy-wide effect in analyzing the impact of cash transfers. To the author’s knowledge, this has never been done before for Indonesia. Unlike previous studies, this paper is unique as it contains sensitivity analysis on how transfers can be mistargeted and reach the non-poor and looks at the implications not only for poverty and inequality but also for the rest of the economy.