Statistical Measurement of the Overall Scale of Urban Poverty in China

Abstract

As China is undergoing rapid urbanization and social transformation, the research on urban poverty has become increasingly important. So far, the Chinese government has still not drawn an official urban poverty line. The statistical measurement of the overall scale of urban poverty in China is carried out based on three aspects: price adjustment, income distribution data, and main poverty-stricken population, in which the trend analysis of the poor population, the maximum likelihood estimation, and the recent price adjustment are used as measures. The arithmetic average of the urban poverty population, measured via the above three different measures, is taken to obtain the current overall scale of urban poverty in China, which is 10.816 million.