The Chinese economy has been maintaining a rapid growth over the past decade, but the year to year growth rate is slowing down. In the same period, the growth rate of fixed investment in China is continuously declining year by year, so if we want to continue to maintain a certain rate of economic growth, we must find a healthy, balanced new economic growth mechanism. Over the past few years, the GDP growth has been gratifying, but we must also see that the local economies are not balanced. The eastern region and some key cities have occupied more economic and social resources in the past and achieved greater economic growth. Under the influence of targeted poverty alleviation policies, the demographic dividend, reform dividend, and opening-up bonuses in poverty-stricken areas are gradually being released. The usage of human resources and the new technologies brought up by reform and opening up are all stimulating new areas for poverty-stricken areas to adjust their economic structure and industries to find a new “Effective growth point”.
It is no longer realistic to rely solely on one policy or one measure to lift millions of people out of poverty. The marginal effect of poverty alleviation policies continues to diminish. In response to this trend, China adopts different strategies for poverty alleviation, such as industrial poverty alleviation, education poverty alleviation, health poverty alleviation, vocational skills training, relocation, protection, and other miscellaneous measures. This will be the “main axis” of poverty alleviation and development work. The implementation of these measures will create a huge scale effect and bring new opportunities for the Chinese economy’s development in next step.
To achieve the long-standing effect of poverty alleviation, the government needs to Concurrently carry out eco-environmental protection in the poverty alleviation work. China’s poverty-stricken areas are mostly distributed in arid regions, high mountain areas, and high-cold regions. Local residents face enormous pressures for survival. On the basis of low production levels, they have to plunder the resources for exploitation and management, coupled with the lack of environmental awareness and the weakness of environmental remediation efforts has in turn aggravated the deterioration of the ecological environment and formed a vicious poverty cycle of “fragile ecology-poverty-destruction-fragile ecology”. Therefore, the protection and management of the ecological environment is an important task in the poverty-stricken areas. Efforts in ecological and environmental protection to prevent further degradation of the ecological environment must be a priority.
Steps should also be taken to improve the quality of the workforce and increase self-reliance. Poverty-stricken areas not only have the highest incidence of poverty, but have low-quality labors. There is a serious shortage of highly skilled labor resources and practical and technical personnel. Statistics show that the dropout rate for junior high school students in western poor areas is more than 10 times the national average level. Only 40% of junior high school graduates in poor areas can continue to receive high school education. At the same time, the quality of compulsory education in impoverished areas is not high.
Policies should promote the leading role of central cities in concentrating contiguous poverty-stricken areas, and seek to standardize the basic operational procedures for targeted poverty alleviation. Although targeted poverty alleviation requires different specific measures to be taken according to poverty reduction targets, there is room for further improvement in the aspects of field surveys, poverty level screening assessments, file establishment markings, tracking of poverty alleviation funds, implementation of specific poverty alleviation measures, and effect analysis. This can be combined with today’s information technology to develop a set of effective and flexible systems. The success or failure of poverty alleviation development depends on precision, and the accuracy of operational processes is equally important. The government can take the advantage of mobile internet to share accurate poverty reduction processes and experiences.
Finally, state and provincial governments must establish internal and external supervision mechanisms to minimize the potential for corruption and the occurrence of corruption. Past poverty alleviation experience tells us that corruption and formalism will also occur in the absence of effective supervision and poverty alleviation work. To avoid corruption and formalism precisely is a powerful guarantee for the successful promotion of poverty alleviation.