Who Deserves to Be Minimally Alive in China's Cities? Urban Decisions on the Dibao
49 Pages Posted: 27 Aug 2013
Date Written: 2013 Augus,
Abstract
The institutions of welfare and social assistance have come under challenge in the past decade-plus, first in the industrialized West. In China too, it would appear that the central government’s relief plan of the late 1990s was undergoing alteration by the end of the 2000s, also, like those in the West -- to judge from central-level proclamations -- growing more unfriendly to the idea of funding the fit and the firm. First, we use the pairing of the Western, democratic countries’ new direction in welfare with China’s comparable recent change in social assistance policy to point to commonalities in causal factors, but also to alert the reader to an important difference in decision making in the two.
We find that only some of China’s cities chose to respond to the central government’s new injunction to emphasize employment, not handouts, for the impecunious. We then go on to explore how we can use the distinction between polities to make sense of the recent politics of locally-provided social assistance in China.
Given China's accountability system, whereby officials must answer to their superiors and not to their voters, the factor that seems most critical in explaining the difference in the actions of urban administrators in different cities is the level of wealth in a city. Wealth affects both the decisional autonomy and the career ambition of municipal officials, both of which shape city officials’ welfare choices.
Keywords: China, urban, social assistance, unemployment, needy, officials' incentives
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