Extending Social Assistance in China: Lessons from the Minimum Living Standard Scheme
28 Pages Posted: 19 Jan 2009
There are 2 versions of this paper
Extending Social Assistance in China: Lessons from the Minimum Living Standard Scheme
Date Written: January 19, 2008
Abstract
Facing rapid demographic, social and economic transformation, China has taken steps to extend and strengthen the urban Minimum Living Standard Scheme (MLSS). The MLSS is a social assistance programme initially focused on the chronically poor, but later extended to the long-term unemployed. The extension of the MLSS led to a rise in the number of beneficiaries from 2.6 million in 1999 to 20.6 million in 2002, although long-term poor migrants remain excluded. There has also been a broadening of the MLSS, focused initially on mainly income transfers, but later including education and health exemptions, community work, and housing. This paper outlines these trends and discusses what lessons other developing countries could learn from the extension of social assistance in China.
Keywords: social assistance, urban poor, poverty line, social protection
JEL Classification: I30
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?
Recommended Papers
-
By David Dollar and Aart Kraay
-
Growth Still is Good for the Poor
By David Dollar, Tatjana Kleineberg, ...
-
What Can New Survey Data Tell Us About Recent Changes in Distribution and Poverty?
By Martin Ravallion and Shaohua Chen
-
By David Dollar and Aart Kraay
-
How Did the World's Poorest Fare in the 1990s?
By Shaohua Chen and Martin Ravallion
-
Inequality and Growth: What Can the Data Say?
By Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo
-
Inequality and Growth: What Can the Data Say?
By Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo
-
True World Income Distribution, 1988 and 1993: First Calculation Based on Household Surveys Alone