Poverty Exclusion or Strategic Distribution?Impoverished Households and Government Subsidies in Rural China

In order to carry out the targeted poverty alleviation program in rural areas, Chinese central government has allocated hundreds of billions of yuans of special funds and deployed a sizable number of local cadres over the past decades. After reviewing the historical procedures of the targeted poverty alleviation program and outlining, this paper mainly analyzes the policy misallocations between beneficiaries and impoverished groups to examine the performance of the Targeted Poverty Alleviation (TPA) program conducted in rural China. Unlike the common perspective of identifying bias of poor households, this paper takes the recipients view, assessing the actual flow of government benefits to the poverty group targeted by the policy. By analyzing the latest six waves of China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) dataset from 2010 to 2020, it has been a noticeable phenomenon of poverty exclusion in the distribution of government subsidies in rural China. Government subsidies have significantly bee