Poverty in China as its Economy Nears High Income: Lessons from Japan, South Korea and the United States During Their Upper-Middle Income Transitions

Abstract

This paper summarizes what developing countries that are on the cusp of high income can learn from the approaches to poverty reduction adopted by the United States, Japan and the Republic of Korea. China is almost as well-off today as the United States was in 1960, Japan in 1980, and South Korea in 2000, when they reached high-income. China’s poverty reduction strategy is quite different from the approaches adopted by these countries. Relatedly, China’s performance in reducing poverty rates—using developmentally appropriate standards such as the official definition of poverty adopted by the US in the 1960s—is considerably less impressive than widely believed.