Power and Poverty in China: Why Some Counties Perform Better in Poverty Alleviation?

Eliminating poverty is a worldwide problem, but China has recently made major achievements in poverty alleviation. By the end of 2020, 832 nationally designated poor counties had all been lifted out of poverty within five years. Why do some poor counties perform better in poverty alleviation? This paper leverages a unique county-level dataset of 832 nationally designated poor counties in China and uses discrete-time event history analysis to understand the relationship between political institutions and poverty alleviation. We find that the presence of a county party committee secretary concurrently holding a higher rank position above the county level significantly increases the odds ratio of accomplishing poverty alleviation tasks. Previous studies have emphasized the important role of empowering people in democracies for poverty reduction. This study shows that empowering key governmental actors in authoritarian regimes can help them increase their bargaining power and improve the performance of poverty alleviation. In addition, this paper echoes the research on political institutions of authoritarian systems and deepens the understanding of the importance of the higher-ranking institution of Chinese officials.