Public disclosure of poverty relief funds management soon

Updated: 2011-12-07 09:59

By He Dan (China Daily)

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BEIJING - China was striving to improve management of funds earmarked for poverty relief projects in rural areas, said a senior official of the Ministry of Finance on Tuesday.

There will be regular information disclosure about the projects and officials found guilty of embezzling or misusing the funds would be severely punished, said Assistant Finance Minister Hu Jinglin.

Considering the central government's huge investment in poverty reduction, the country was also considering establishing a comprehensive evaluation mechanism to determine whether local governments have used the poverty alleviation funds in an effective and efficient way, Hu said.

If a local government wanted more poverty reduction funds next year they would have to produce a satisfactory evaluation report, said Hu during a news conference, giving a summary of the projected anti-poverty work from 2011 to 2020.

The central government will increase poverty alleviation funds in 2012, maintaining a 20-percent rise. The amount allocated for this year is 27 billion yuan ($4.2 billion), he said.

The move came after China raised its poverty threshold for its rural population on Nov 29, which defined a resident with an annual net income of less than 2,300 yuan as poor, as against 1,196 yuan in 2009.

As per the new poverty line standards, an estimated 128 million rural residents are considered living in poverty, accounting for 13.4 percent of China's rural population, according to Fan Xiaojian, head of the Leading Group Office of Poverty Alleviation and Development under the State Council. Before the revision, only 26.88 million rural dwellers were deemed poor.

Chen Shaohua, senior statistician in the Development Economics Research Group of the World Bank, believes China's new poverty line matches medium-level income in the world's middle-and-low income countries.

She argued that based on China's purchasing-power parity level in 2005, the new threshold of 2,300 yuan translates into about $1.8 a day, which is slightly higher than the World Bank standard of $1.25 set in 2008.

Du Ying, vice-minister of the National Development and Reform Commission, stressed at the meeting that "millions among the rural population were still not able to access clean drinking water".

"China will work hard to solve the issue by 2013 as an indispensable part of the government's poverty reduction efforts," he said.