Greater transparency

While explaining the State Council's poverty alleviation plan, Wang Guoliang pointed out problems that hinder the current initiatives.

"For a long time, our poverty relief efforts have not been well targeted, which resulted in misuse of government funds and incentives," Wang Guoliang said.

In December 2013, the National Audit Office (NAO) said that some funds set aside for underdeveloped regions had been misused based on an audit carried out across 19 targeted counties in six provincial-level regions of Guangxi, Yunnan, Guizhou, Shaanxi, Gansu and Ningxia in April and May of that year. It audited funds appropriated to these counties from 2010 to 2012.

During the three years, 3.92 billion yuan ($643 million) was injected into the 19 counties with the audit checking 32 percent of it, or 1.24 billion yuan ($203 million).

The audit found that 326 million yuan ($53 million) had been misused through false declaration, embezzlement and officials' wasting it on expensive gifts, banquets and tours. The results led to a total of 137 individuals being investigated, Jiang Xiaohua, an official with the NAO, revealed.

According to the State Council's plan, county-level governments will be charged with identifying all of the poor population under their jurisdiction by visiting potential households and then publicizing the information gathered so as to prevent fraud. Moreover, an active national database of poor households will be established, where the financial information of each will be updated routinely.

Li Jing, a senior research fellow with the Rural Development Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said that whether or not households were entitled to government poverty relief grants used to be decided on by a village or township official, which left higher-level governments unable to discover fraud. As a result, households with close links to officials had access to grants when they didn't need them while those in need were denied access to these grants.

"In recent years, some villages adopted the voting system to decide on the list of potential grant recipients and publicized their information. This reform won a lot of support and praise and should be further promoted," Li said.

Wang Guoliang said that the procedure of identifying the cause of poverty of each listed household and giving them the help they need is key to the success of poverty relief efforts.

"For example, for those households whose income earners cannot work due to illness or injury, it is necessary to distribute more social security benefits to them. For families that became poor after paying enormous medical bills for a family member, it is important to find jobs or entrepreneurship opportunities for them. A large amount of detailed investigative work is needed to ensure that different households are given tailored grant programs or incentives," Wang said.

Each household will be assigned a government official to help it to climb out of poverty, said the State Council's plan.

The new plan is also targeted at reforming the distribution of government poverty alleviation funds. According to the plan, the power to ratify programs using these funds will be delegated to county-level governments while provincial- and city-level governments will be primarily responsible for supervising the use of these funds.

Wang said that provincial governments, which now possess the power to ratify most poverty alleviation programs, cannot learn the actual situations of each village, while county or township governments can better manage these programs, which are mostly small in scale. He believes that the latest reform can raise the efficiency of government funds.

Li said that the design and implementation of the government's poverty relief programs should also take advantage of market mechanisms and non-governmental organizations. She said that government projects can cooperate with similar projects funded by enterprises or other private investors so that the participation of private capital can be maximized. "The use and supervision of government poverty alleviation funds could be entrusted with a third party, such as NGOs or even the villagers benefiting from these programs," he suggested.

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Better Off

Since the initiation of reform and opening-up policies in the late 1970s, the Chinese Government has implemented extensive poverty alleviation efforts with the aim to secure subsistence, especially food and clothing, for poor rural residents. By the end of 2010, it had managed to reduce the impoverished rural population, who lacked food and clothing, from 250 million to 26.88 million, which in turn lowered the percentage of rural residents in poverty from 30.7 percent to 2.8 percent, according to a paper released by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

China has made outstanding contributions to global poverty alleviation efforts, accounting for 76.88 percent of the total reduction in the number of people living in poverty globally between 1990 and 2005, according to statistics from the UN Development Program.

Rural residents with an annual per-capita net income of 2,300 yuan ($377) or less are classified as poor under China's national poverty standard adopted in 2011, an increase from the 1,274-yuan ($209) standard used before the change.

Based on the latest national poverty line, China's poor population in rural areas declined from 122.38 million to 98.99 million throughout 2012, down by a remarkable 8 percent.

(Compiled by Beijing Review)