[Viewpoint] Cheng Huixia, SSDPP: Consolidating and expanding the anti-poverty achievements and comprehensively promoting rural revitalization requires financial poverty alleviation ​policies to take a new path of three-dimensional empowerment



Financial poverty alleviation aims to stimulate the endogenous development power and entrepreneurial income increasing ability of the poor. Empowerment and enabling are the natural logic of financial poverty alleviation policy.

However, empowerment does not naturally lead to enabling. Financial poverty alleviation policy focuses on addressing the "capital shortage" faced by the development of impoverished areas and poor people. It is a policy arrangement to ensure the right of poor households to shake off poverty. The key to getting rid of poverty is, however, to "have the ability to convert credit funds into productive capital" and use it effectively to increase income and repay loans on time. Eliminating the discrimination and exclusion of the poor in the financial market is only the first step for the poor to get rid of their plight. More importantly, after eliminating or alleviating the financial exclusion, the poor with the same credit right can use the credit right and financial services to improve their situation. The greatest value of the financial poverty alleviation policy is, therefore, not to solve the "shortage of material capital" for short-term entrepreneurship and income increase, but to empower the poor and promote them to embark on the path of self-development.

Since the 18th National Congress of CPC, China has organized the largest-scale poverty alleviation campaign benefitting the largest number of people with the largest amount of investment, addressing the problem of absolute poverty that has plagued the Chinese nation for thousands of years. Getting rid of poverty is, however, not the end point. Exploring financial poverty alleviation policies to further empower those who have just shaken off poverty is of great value to improving the quality of poverty alleviation, revitalizing rural areas and promoting common prosperity.

On the basis of summarizing the empowerment function of financial poverty alleviation policies, combined with the random sampling survey and statistical results of 2982 poor families in the urban-rural fringe of some prefectural cities, suburban counties and remote rural areas in 23 central and western provinces, such as Henan, Heilongjiang, Yunnan, Gansu and Jiangxi, the study found that:

1. Financing empowerment is the main path for the financial poverty alleviation policy to empower poor people in the period of key problem-tackling for poverty alleviation, but it is only the prerequisite for real empowerment. Pro-poor fiscal policy must focus on enabling poor people in order to really empower them.

2. Compared with relatively adequate financial empowerment, the financial poverty alleviation policy is relatively weak in enabling the poor, which is reflected in the low activity of the financial accounts of the poor and the little financial knowledge and insufficient financial capacity of the poor. It is difficult to effectively allocate pro-poor loans or effectively express financial needs, and financial institutions are unable to develop loan products and other financial services to meet the needs of poor households.

3. Consolidating and expanding the anti-poverty achievements requires that the financial poverty alleviation policy go beyond the idea of financing empowerment, shift the focus to enabling, and take the new path of "three-dimensional" empowerment, that is, continue to empower, promote financial capacity-building and guide financial institutions to develop more targeted financial products.

According to the demonstration logic of the new path of enabling poor people of financial anti-poverty policy characterized by "three-dimension integration", this study puts forward the following policy suggestions:

1. To appropriately regulate financial institutions and improve the financial capacity of low-income people

2. To actively guide the financial market to help rural areas embark on the path of high-quality development

3. To encourage local financial institutions to combine financial technology with digital technology so as to improve the use frequency of formal accounts

The full text is printed in Chinese Public Administration, No. 9, 2021: 87-93

DOI:10.19735/j.issn.1006-0863.2021.09.12