Does land transfer help alleviate relative poverty in China? An analysis based on income and capability perspective

By the end of 2020, China had achieved the goal of eradicating absolute poverty and entered an essential stage of consolidating the achievements of poverty alleviation and promoting rural revitalization. In the future, poverty governance will shift towards relative poverty. Based on the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) database and the propensity score matching model, this paper empirically analyses the alleviating effect of land transfer on relative poverty among rural households. The results show that land transfer can effectively alleviate the multidimensional relative poverty of rural households, and the effect of transferring out land is greater than that of transferring in land. In the future, to improve the land transfer system and promote rural revitalization, it is necessary to actively establish a long-term financial poverty alleviation system in rural areas to ensure a stable income for households that transfer in land, strengthen the construction and regulation of the land transfer market, and further improve the rural social security system to provide comprehensive social security for migrant workers who move to cities and agricultural operators who stay in rural areas.