Evaluation on the Effect of Investment in Employment and Poverty Alleviation under the Guidance of Urban Pairing Assistance Policy

Abstract

In 2013 and 2016, The State Council issued the policy of urban pairing assistance in western China and put forward new prospects and requirements in employment assistance. To this end, governments responded to the call of forming a twinning employment support portfolio of developed cities in the east to help developing cities in the west. Based on the policy research, this paper evaluates the effect of policy implementation by using Difference-in-Difference (DID) method. The research results show that employment assistance has achieved certain success, the overall economic aggregate of the helped cities has been improved, and the poverty-stricken employed population has been lifted out of poverty and got rich by improving the employment and wage level. However, compared with the increase of the economic aggregate, the fiscal revenue did not realize the synchronous growth with the economy. The main reason is that this round of matching assistance mainly focuses on infrastructure investment, which lacks a sustained hematopoietic mechanism, thus affecting the synchronization of fiscal revenue and GDP growth.