Determinants of livelihood choice and implications for targeted poverty reduction policies: A case study in the YNL river region, Tibetan Plateau

Governmental policies that can develop advantageous endogenous livelihood transition are of great importance for anti-poverty. However, the existing research finds that in the Tibetan Plateau, there is a certain contradiction between the poverty alleviation policies and the local farmers’ needs, and thus the effect of these policies will be weakened and the goal of poverty alleviation be missed. It is therefore imperative to identify and analyze the factors influencing the livelihood choice so that policy makers and development practitioners can design policies that will tackle the poverty afflicting the majority of the local people. This paper provides a new method for anti-poverty policymaking and conducts a case study to enrich the safety net/cargo net paradigms. In this paper, household data in the YNL river region are used and a two-step clustering method is developed to classify these households into three types: hanging in (type I), stepping up (type II) and stepping out (type III). Then a multinomial logit model is adopted to identify determinants of households’ livelihood choice. The results indicate that drought poses a significant negative impact on farmers’ choice of type II, while household size, educational level of labor and medical expenditure have a significant positive impact on the choice of type II; spring frost, proportion of skilled training, borrowed money and the ratio of agricultural equipment have a significant positive impact on their choice of type III. Some anti-poverty policy implications are put forward in the last on the basis of these determinants.