ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Public Health
Sec. Health Economics
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2025.1657269
This article is part of the Research TopicPublic Health Outcomes: The Role of Social Security Systems in Improving Residents' Health Welfare, Volume IIView all 8 articles
The impact of health shocks on vulnerability to poverty: evidence from rural households in China
Provisionally accepted
- Nanyang Normal University, Nanyang, China
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Background: "Poverty due to illness" presents the core challenge for both the Healthy China Initiative and the consolidation of poverty alleviation achievements, concerning health equity and sustainable social development.Existing studies have predominantly assessed the impact of health shocks on poverty from a static perspective. However, they often overlook the dynamic nature of poverty, failing to account for the impact of health shocks on future poverty risks.Methods: Based on the data of the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) from 2012 to 2020, this paper measures the poverty vulnerability under the criteria of absolute poverty and relative poverty, and empirically analyzes the impact of health shocks on rural households' poverty vulnerability.The results show that health shocks have a significant positive effect on household poverty vulnerability, and the effect is greater under absolute poverty criteria. Further analysis revealed that a higher level of education significantly mitigated the impact of health shocks on poverty vulnerability; Further analysis revealed that a higher level of education significantly mitigated the impact of health shocks on poverty vulnerability; compared to the eastern region, the exacerbating effect of health shocks on poverty vulnerability was more severe in the central and western regions, presenting a gradient difference of "eastern region < central region < western region". In addition, we find that declines in agricultural production income and wage income are important channels through which health shocks affect poverty vulnerability.This study provides the policy basis for the government to establish the "pre-warning" mechanism of poverty and take effective measures to prevent the large-scale return to poverty.
Keywords: Health shocks, Poverty vulnerability, agricultural production income, wage income, Rural households
Received: 01 Jul 2025; Accepted: 12 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Zhao, Wang, Zhou and Zhang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Xinzheng Wang, Nanyang Normal University, Nanyang, China
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