Poverty improvement policies and household income: Evidence from China

Haonan Zhang; Jiapeng Dai

doi:10.1016/j.heliyon.2023.e21442

Poverty improvement policies and household income: Evidence from China

Heliyon. 2023 Oct 23;9(11):e21442. doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2023.e21442. eCollection 2023 Nov.

Authors

Haonan Zhang¹, Jiapeng Dai²

Affiliations

¹ School of Labor and Human Resources, Renmin University of China, Beijing 100872, Beijing China.
² School of Government, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210046, Jiangsu, China.

Abstract

The purposes of this research is to analyzed the impact of various policies on household incomes and to obtain the influential factors according to their importance. Utilizing a survey data of poor households supported by poverty improvement policies, for individual income, this research implements the traditional random forest method. To analyze the influence of strategies on the overall household earnings, we propose a novel splitting method centered on copula entropy and construct a novel choice tree. Finally, we conclude that the policies are generally effective but that levels of effectiveness are varied for people with different levels of income. We also identified the policy arrangement that has the greatest impact on household income.

Keywords: China; Copula; Decision tree; Household income; Machine learning; Policies; Poverty improvement.