Resource entitlements and urban poverty in China

Abstract

China's 'urban villages' are a unique phenomenon in contemporary urbanisation, providing low cost living for low wage rural-urban and urban-urban migrants who rent from a new landlord class of former peasants blessed by the proximity of their former farms to a rapidly expanding city. This serendipitous distribution of land entitlements sets up new and long lasting divisions in urban Chinese society. But the entitlement story of urban villages is not confined to land entitlements. It is the bundle of rights to land, labour, capital, urban services and more generally, the agglomeration benefits created by many people co-locating in a city, that determine well-being, and wealth and poverty experiences and trajectories. In this paper we report on a study of urban village dwellers drawn randomly from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou in which we examine patterns of household entitlements and their relationship to poverty. We adapt Sen's (1981) entitlement approach to incorporate the concepts of vulnerability and urban subsistence resource starvation (following Sen's analysis of food starvation as entitlement failure). Using regression models of household poverty functions, we identify the sensitivity of urban poverty to various degrees of entitlement failure. We relate the empirical analysis to Sen and de Sotos' theories of property rights and to the idea of the right to the city.