{"title":"Welfare enhancement or environment improvement: How does China's rural revitalization assistance policy work? Evidence from China","authors":"Man Huang, Xue Zhao, Jincai Zhuang","doi":"10.1002/ldr.5213","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"In the context of sustainable development, the greatest challenge facing society today is to improve welfare of the disadvantaged while preserving the environment. This paper constructed a theoretical framework of “policy‐welfare‐environment,” explored the effects in terms of individual welfare enhancement and village environment improvement, and conduct empirical tests on a sample of 1208 rural households in China. The results show that: (1) The assistance policy can significantly improve the overall welfare of the disadvantaged groups, and meanwhile, it can improve different dimensions of welfare, with the degree from high to low was a social opportunity, spiritual feeling, and economic situation. (2) The assistance policy can increase the probability of adopting environmental protection behavior, which in turn can significantly improve the village environment. (3) Welfare improvements in social opportunities mediate between the assistance policy and village environment improvements, while improvements in spiritual feelings and economic status do not. In addition, there is age heterogeneity in the welfare enhancement effect of the policy in the economic status dimension and the spiritual feeling dimension. The conclusions provide valuable policy enlightenment for assistance policy formulation and environmental governance, and can protect the ecological environment while improving public welfare, which is in line with the trend of sustainable development.","PeriodicalId":203,"journal":{"name":"Land Degradation & Development","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.6000,"publicationDate":"2024-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Land Degradation & Development","FirstCategoryId":"97","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1002/ldr.5213","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"农林科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
In the context of sustainable development, the greatest challenge facing society today is to improve welfare of the disadvantaged while preserving the environment. This paper constructed a theoretical framework of “policy‐welfare‐environment,” explored the effects in terms of individual welfare enhancement and village environment improvement, and conduct empirical tests on a sample of 1208 rural households in China. The results show that: (1) The assistance policy can significantly improve the overall welfare of the disadvantaged groups, and meanwhile, it can improve different dimensions of welfare, with the degree from high to low was a social opportunity, spiritual feeling, and economic situation. (2) The assistance policy can increase the probability of adopting environmental protection behavior, which in turn can significantly improve the village environment. (3) Welfare improvements in social opportunities mediate between the assistance policy and village environment improvements, while improvements in spiritual feelings and economic status do not. In addition, there is age heterogeneity in the welfare enhancement effect of the policy in the economic status dimension and the spiritual feeling dimension. The conclusions provide valuable policy enlightenment for assistance policy formulation and environmental governance, and can protect the ecological environment while improving public welfare, which is in line with the trend of sustainable development.
期刊介绍:
Land Degradation & Development is an international journal which seeks to promote rational study of the recognition, monitoring, control and rehabilitation of degradation in terrestrial environments. The journal focuses on:
- what land degradation is;
- what causes land degradation;
- the impacts of land degradation
- the scale of land degradation;
- the history, current status or future trends of land degradation;
- avoidance, mitigation and control of land degradation;
- remedial actions to rehabilitate or restore degraded land;
- sustainable land management.