How to identify poor immigrants? - An empirical study of the Three Gorges Reservoir in China

- We analyzed immigrant poverty in the TGRR from the perspective of multidimensional poverty.
- We have added relevant dimensions of social security into the measurement of multidimensional poverty based on the dual cutoff method.
- We adopted deprived dimensions of every household, the demographic characteristics as variables to figure out the poverty causes of immigrants in the TGRR.

This paper aims to study on the precise identification and targeting of immigrant poverty in the TGRR, with a multi-dimensional poverty line as a standard, which has transcended the traditional income poverty line. Then, we figured out the changing trend and the causes of immigrant poverty under the perspective of multidimensional poverty. Based on the dual cutoff method and regression analysis, the study results show that the discrepancy of poverty before and after immigration is significant, but the poverty problem of immigrants in the TGRR is still serious. The current multi-poverty incidence of immigrants is 30.15%, which means that there are still 2.3097 million people under poverty. The major causes of poverty in this region are poverty in assets, poverty in education and poverty in health. The poverty contribution rate of land scarcity has increased from 12.16% to 29.52% with the deterioration of land loss, which has a negative effect on immigrants' livelihood. The results reveal several outstanding poverty problems in this region: the coverage of social security of immigrants is far from ideal; There are still 12.75% of the impoverished immigrants without medical insurance and 11.36% without pension insurance; the percentage of female laborers, the education level of laborers, the percentage of agricultural expenditure and the percentage of medical expenditure have significant correlations with immigrants' poverty in this region. The paper argues that the precise identification and targeting of poverty reduction in China should be undertaken from a multidimensional perspective.