COVID-19, Spatial Social Distance and Relative Poverty Governance

Abstract

The sudden global outbreak of the new crown pneumonia epidemic at the end of 2019 has caused a huge impact on the world’s economic and social development. It has also brought new challenges to the governance of relative poverty in China. This paper compares the connotation and characteristics of relative poverty, and argues that relative poverty mainly encompasses three levels: income, viability and rights. Starting from the perspective of maintaining spatial social distance, the main strategy to prevent and control the new crown epidemic, the paper explores the inner influence mechanism of relative poverty governance in the prevention and control of the epidemic, and concludes that maintaining spatial social distance has a series of impacts from poverty alleviation, including poor agricultural production and marketing, relatively poor educational facilities, difficult operation of rural scenic spots, hindered non-agricultural employment and work, relocation facing unemployment, and obvious social psychological anxiety. Accordingly, the following measures are proposed to address relative poverty management with digital economy tools as the main orientation: innovate digital production and marketing matching mechanisms, improve online education infrastructure, launch digital cloud tourism dual-line experience, strengthen digital economy employment traction, and cultivate digital social information literacy, etc.