Poverty Measurement and Evaluation at the County Level in China: From the Perspective of Nighttime Light Data

摘要

Precise poverty alleviation is an important task for the party and the country. Accurately measuring and identifying poverty-stricken areas is of great significance for the formulation and implementation of targeted poverty alleviation policies. In order to solve the problems of the single basis of poverty identification and insufficient consideration of the diversity of poverty causes, nighttime light data was measured and used to build a multidimensional poverty evaluation index system based on the pentagonal framework of livelihoods. The research result shows that the distribution of multidimensional poverty-stricken counties identified by nighttime light data has a high degree of coincidence with the fourteen contiguous poverty-stricken areas designated by the state, and the distribution of multidimensional poverty-stricken counties has significant spatial agglomeration. At the same time, poverty alleviation work needs to pay attention to the multidimensional poverty phenomenon in economically developed areas in the future, in order to solve the problem of uneven and uncoordinated regional development. This research can provide data resources and method references for the future, including continuous monitoring of poverty areas and the assessment of poverty alleviation effects, as nighttime light data is rich in data, easy to obtain, and has a wide coverage.