On the afternoon of 14^th September 2017, the 59^th Jingshi Business Celebrity Forum was successfully held at library building. Prof. Bjorn Gustafsson from University of Gothenburg in Sweden was invited to the forum. He presented a speech on the topic of “Growing into Relative Poverty——Urban China 1988 to 2013”.

Prof. Bjorn Gustafsson has been working at University of Gothenburg in Sweden for over 30 years. From July 1996 to June 2002, he has been working as senior research fellow in social policy for SFR. His focus of study were poverty and income maintenance issues. Since 1999, he has been working as a researcher for IZA at Bonn, Germany.

 

His speech can be mainly divided into 3 sections. First of all, Prof. Bjorn Gustafsson introduced the background of his research. He studied the data from 1981 to 2013 in China and found that poverty during that period of time was largely declined, from 8.78 million people in 1981 to 0.25 million people in 2013. After that, he briefly stated literature reviews of other scholars’ studies on China’s poverty and urban income issues, and pointed out that few scholars have paid attentions to the most recent studies. Lastly, Prof. Bjorn explained in details about his research method and content, and concluded that although poverty situation in China has been improved greatly, poverty rate has always been on increase from 1988 to 2007. People who transferred from rural area to urban area are prone to be affected more by the issue of poverty. From 2002-2017, the poverty gap has been narrowing. He also found that the majority people suffering from poverty are adults who live in low-income cities, and have received only short-term education. Targeting at the issue, he proposed some suggestions, for example, improving the pension system, making labor market and social security system available to new urban people who have just left the rural area.

After the speech, teachers and students actively proposed ideas and raised questions. Prof. Bjorn answered them one by one in details. The forum ended in a warm round of applause.