Monetary and Non-Monetary Poverty within Urban Locals and Rural Migrants in China using Inequality-Sensitive Poverty Measures

This paper measures monetary and non-monetary poverty among urban local and rural migrant groups in the urban labour market in China, capturing incidence, intensity and inequality of poverty. To measure non-monetary poverty in multiple dimensions the chosen indicators are education, health status, health insurance and pension insurance. Using data from the China Household Income Project for the years 2002, 2007, and 2013, it appears that although monetary poverty in both groups is low, migrants have higher levels of non-monetary deprivation for various levels of poverty thresholds. Compared to the urban locals, the rural migrants experienced relatively less severe poverty than mild or moderate poverty during 2002 and 2007. Our Shapley decomposition exercise on non-monetary poverty measure reveals that the incidence contributes most to the urban-migrant gap, and the contribution of intensity is higher than that of inequality. The most important factors in multidimensional poverty for both groups are health insurance and pension insurance in all years. Our logit analysis shows that the effects of demographic characteristics, level of contract, occupation, and the industry have different impacts on these two groups.