Targeted poverty alleviation promotes sustainable socio-economic and ecological development in China’s poor areas

Abstract

Ending extreme poverty and achieving sustainable development by 2030 poses a significant challenge for developing countries. In the past decade, China has pioneered the Targeted Poverty Alleviation (TPA) strategy and implemented a range of anti-poverty programs, aiming to reconcile poverty reduction with environmental restoration. However, the effectiveness of the TPA strategy in facilitating sustainable development in the poor areas of China (PAC) remains unclear. Drawing on a perspective of systems, this study compiles a panel dataset of 832 nationally designated poverty-stricken counties in China from 2013 to 2020 and employ the coupling coordination degree model to examine the coupling and coordination relationships among economic, social, and environmental systems in the PAC. We find that during the TPA period, the socioeconomic level developed rapidly, while the environmental quality was slightly improved in the PAC. The TPA strategy promotes the coordinated development of social, economic, and ecological systems in the PAC, shifting the relationship between human and environment from imbalance to coordination. Our findings underscore the necessity for the Chinese government to persist in its environmental restoration efforts in the PAC to guarantee a sustained development progress.

Keywords

Targeted poverty alleviation / Sustainable development / Coupling coordination degree / Poor areas / China

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Xunhuan Li: Writing – review & editing, Writing – original draft, Software, Methodology, Formal analysis, Data curation, Conceptualization. Yang Zhou: Writing – review & editing, Supervision, Investigation, Funding acquisition, Conceptualization.

Declaration of competing interests

The authors declare that there are no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that influenced the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grants No. 72373153 and 41871183). We are grateful to the constructive and valuable comments from the editor and two anonymous revivers, which help improve our study substantially. Thank you to Suhang Li from School of Geography and Resource Science, Guizhou Education University for helping collect data in this study.

Supplementary materials

Supplementary material associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at doi:10.1016/j.geosus.2024.04.007.

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