Poverty in Shenzhen

The assessment and alleviation of poverty remains an urgent question throughout the globe. Especially urban poverty is gaining importance in China due to immense migration in recent years. In how far is migration related to poverty and does the factors that drag households into poverty differ between migrants and non-migrants? Do migrants face income discrimination resulting in poverty? Shenzhen, one of the most highly developed cities in mainland China with an unprecedented growth and a huge migrant population and huge income inequality is an especially interesting case. We use the Shenzhen household survey 2005 which explicitly includes migrants to investigate these questions. Using new purchasing power parity prices from the World Bank’s International Comparison Project corrected by a regional expense basket we estimate poverty in Shenzhen. We find that grave poverty is low in Shenzhen but relative poverty is significant. We conduct Probit, Tobit and OLS regressions to examine the connections between migratory status and poverty. We find that migrants are much more endangered and the causes for poverty differ drastically from their non- migrant counterparts. A large part of the causes for poverty are of social nature or due to discrimination and will remain a problem for poverty alleviation.