Regional Equity and Influencing Factor of Social Assistance in China

Social assistance is the last safety net in the social security system and plays a vital role in poverty alleviation in countries around the world. Promoting the equal financial assistance is meaningful to achieve equalization of social assistance. Based on the provincial panel data from 2002 to 2017, this paper analyzes the dynamic characteristics and main influencing factors of the equity of social assistance in China, using the Theil index and geographically weighted regression (GWR) model. The results suggest that the level of per capita social assistance expenditure (PSAE) in China keeps increasing year by year, but the changes in different regions and provinces are quite different. These changes not only significantly changed the spatial pattern of PSAE in China, but also greatly improved its spatial coupling with the deeply impoverished areas. Further analysis shows that the regional inequality of PSAE between provinces is obvious during the study period, and the inter-regional inequality is significantly higher than the intra-regional inequality. This makes inter-regional inequality become the main source of the regional inequality of PSAE in China for a long time. According to GWR results, there is obvious spatiotemporal heterogeneity in the influence intensity and direction of the per capita financial revenue, urbanization rate, urban unemployment rate, natural disaster-affected area, and transfer payment intensity on the PSAE. The urbanization rate and per capita financial revenue are the main driving factors of PSAE, and the impact intensity of per capita financial revenue tends to strengthen. The remaining three factors have a positive effect on PSAE, but the effect intensity is not high.