6. China’s Multidimensional Poverty and Trade

Over the past 40 years of reform and opening up, China's economy has maintained a rapid growth. China’s poverty reduction achievements have been particularly remarkable: more than 700 million Chinese people have been lifted from poverty. Meanwhile, China’s import and export trade volume has risen several folds and, by 2017, China has become the first largest importer and exporter in the world. The paper seeks to understand the links between poverty and trade and how poverty restricts participation in international trade. The assessment of poverty usually relies upon a monetary indicator, this paper, on the contrary, adopts multidimensional poverty calculated by fuzzy sets methodology at the provincial level and compares the trade volume suggesting an interesting tendency between multidimensional poverty and import-export.