Less Poverty, More Employment: Helping the European Union to achieve its 2020 targets - A Study of the organisation of the European Union Cohesion Policy with special reference to anti-poverty policy in the People’s Republic of China

This study is about the ways in which China and the EU organise their medium-term policies to reduce poverty and to raise and maintain employment. In China, antipoverty objectives are enshrined in the current Eleventh Five Year Plan and will feature in its soon-to-be published successor, the Twelfth, and in an accompanying ten-year plan dealing specifically with poverty reduction. In the EU, poverty reduction and high employment are also ten-year objectives and are central to its plan for Europe 2020. And, in order to pursue these similar objectives, China and the EU both make use of the fact that poorer people are concentrated in certain geographic areas and use regionally-differentiated development policies to seek to raise incomes in a sustainable way. In China, policy targets villages which are officially classified as poor, which may be concentrated in the centre or the high plateau in the west; the EU targets the citizens of its poorest regions which are predominantly in the east and south. China’s regionally differentiated policies take a number of forms, ranging from the massive policy experiments to co-ordinate urban and rural development in Chongqing and Chengdu to the highlighting of areas of particular poverty in its antipovertyplan. In the EU, poorer citizens are targeted through EU Cohesion Policy,which combines programmes for physical investments and for social actions.