The Impact of Foreign Trade and Urbanization on Poverty Reduction: Empirical Evidence from China

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The Impact of Foreign Trade and Urbanization on Poverty Reduction: Empirical Evidence from China

Interesting topic; however, some issues that should be improved:  

The manuscript is supposed to examine the correlations between poverty reduction and urbanisation as well as foreign trade. The main question of the research should be whether foreign trade and urbanisation alleviate/reduce the poverty rate?! It is not clear what does poverty reduction mean in the research? Poverty reduction is grammatically and from the economic point of view is not an appropriate term here in this paper. In fact, the research mainly examines a correlation between the level of disposable income and urbanisation and international trade. The poverty reduction rate is an index includes other variables. The main issue with the research is that the disposable income has been considered as equal as poverty reduction or more accurate the rate of poverty reduction. More reading and literature review on the concepts of poverty, urban poverty, rural poverty, and different types of poverty as well as a definition of index of the urban poverty reduction (alleviation) would help to improve this problem.

Urbanisation also needs clear definition here. What kind of policy implementations or indexes should be considered as urbanisation?

The most important problem: the draft needs careful editing and polishing. Sentences and phrases are not fluent and clear, and have serious problems in terms of grammar and phrasing as well as punctuations. In addition, the logical connections between sentences and arguments are messy and at some points completely missed. To the extent that is not clear if the problem is phrasing or lack of clear understanding of the causal relations between causes and effects. Unfortunately the manuscript does not show the line numbers to refer to them here but the abstract and introduction have serious problems regarding writing and phrasing and lack of logical connections between statements and sentences.

The numerical correlations present only qualitative regressions that do not reflect an in-depth analysis of the global impacts and economic policies that might be more important for the poverty alleviation.

 

Author Response

Thanks very much for taking your time to review this manuscript. I really appreciate all your comments and suggestions! Those comments are valuable and very helpful. We have read through your comments carefully and have made revisions. Please find our itemized responses in below and my revisions in the re-submitted files.

Point 1: It is not clear what does poverty reduction mean in the research?

Response 1：Thank you for your careful review, we appreciate your suggestions. Based on your suggestions we have consulted additional literature. Following the theoretical economic logic of poverty reduction "poverty reduction - income growth - income gap", the meaning of "poverty reduction" in this paper define as the general reflection of the poverty reduction effect in three dimensions, which are: poverty gap, income level and gap, and the population of basic subsistence and basic living allowances expenditures. Specific revisions were made to the structure of the article and to the content.

Point 2: Urbanisation also needs clear definition here. What kind of policy implementations or indexes should be considered as urbanisation?

Response 2: Thank you for your comments. We are grateful to you for your suggestions. Our reply is as follows: In China, there is a distinction between urban and rural household registration based on the place of residence, therefore, China's National Bureau of Statistics have accurate data on urban and rural populations. According to the Chinese government's statistical method, the urbanization indexes is equal to the urban population divided by the total population. We have provided additional information in the abstract section.

Point 3: The most important problem: the draft needs careful editing and polishing.

Response 3: Please accept our apologies for the inconvenience. I had already had my manuscript language editing by level of specialist through MDPI Author Services (ID 37301). I will re-upload the English edited manuscript. 

In addition, the third comment contains issues that are important to us. We have made massive changes to the structure and content of the article to make the logical relationship between sentences and arguments clearer. Please see our manuscript for specific details of the changes.

Point 4: The numerical correlations that do not reflect an in-depth analysis of the global impacts and economic policies that might be more important for the poverty alleviation.

Response 4: 

The economic policy recommendations of our study are shown in the final conclusion section. GDP per capita does not contribute positively to reducing the rural poverty gap, while the total length of rail and road transport routes plays a significant role in the poverty alleviation. fully validating empirical the key role of infrastructure development in narrowing the rural-urban poverty gap. In addition, China’s data show that the inverted U-shaped characteristics of the poverty reduction effect of urbanization. However, some developed areas should also control excessive expansion of the scale of cities and towns, and consider rural revitalization.

For your convenience, we have uploaded drafts with and without logos, please check them out.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors of The Impact of Foreign Trade and Urbanization on Poverty Reduction: Empirical Evidence from China present a relevant topic, the eradication of poverty, a topic on the global agenda. Moreover, the authors analyze the “mechanism and effect of urbanization and foreign trade on poverty reduction” through the regression model.

Bibliographic sources, citations and concepts are used appropriately by the authors of the research. Specifically, sources such as Panudulkitti's (2007) work on “the relationship between urbanization and poverty reduction in a closed economy [7]” and Pengfei Ni and others [36、37] are adequately mentioned and argued in the paper.

The research methodology is relevant, the authors of the research using relevant data from empirical studies, respectively the analysis of the secondary material and the analysis of the relevant literature. Moreover, the authors reflect the regression model used to establish "interactions between exports and urbanization on disposable income per capita."

The results of the research are presented by the authors of the research based on "the regression of the incidence of poverty, the depth of poverty and the intensity of poverty calculated from the data on income of urban residents in each province from 2000 to 2017". Moreover, the authors provide a clear presentation of the "interactive elements of import and level of urbanization", all the more so as the authors mention that "it takes time for imports and urbanization to play an interactive role in reducing poverty". However, we suggest the authors of the research to highlight the main scientific results as a personal contribution to the scientific literature, given that the results are adequately presented but very much oriented on the application side.

The findings are presented by the authors of the research, namely "the results of the empirical analysis based on data from the Chinese interprovincial panel show that urbanization has increased both per capita income and urban and rural, and its effect on rural areas has been stronger than that on urban areas, thus reducing the urban-rural income gap ”. Moreover, the authors present that "exports have significantly reduced rural poverty, and foreign trade has shown a strong positive effect on reducing the share of urban and rural subsistence allowances and minimum social security expenditures." At the same time, we suggest that the authors present the limitations of the study, as well as future research. Moreover, as we mentioned in the results chapter, we appreciate that the personal scientific results that contribute to the scientific literature should be highlighted.

We congratulate the research team, we suggest the revision of the paper according to the above mentioned, and after the revision we propose for acceptance the paper.

Author Response

Reviewer 2:

First of all, we are very grateful for your suggestion to accept our revised article, and we are very pleased that our study will be able to discuss with other researchers through publication.

Point 1: “We suggest the authors of the research to highlight the main scientific results as a personal contribution to the scientific literature, given that the results are adequately presented but very much oriented on the application side.”

Reponse 1: Thank you for your careful review, your suggestions were very useful to us, we appreciate your suggestions. Based on your suggestions, we highlighted our main scientific results:

• Urbanization and foreign trade are conducive to narrowing the urban-rural income gap.
• The poverty reduction effect of urbanization has an inverted U-shaped characteristic, and excessive urban sprawl will bring new poverty.
• urban transportation infrastructure has a significant effect on poverty reduction effect.

foreign trade and urbanization play a good synergistic role in boosting income.

 

Point 2: “we suggest that the authors present the limitations of the study, as well as future research”

Thank you for your comments.

Reponse 2: Although we found that poverty and urbanization present an inverted U-shaped relationship, moderate urbanization is conducive to poverty alleviation, which means that excessive urbanization will bring new poverty, and our research has limitations. We found in empirical analysis that, The impact of foreign trade on the effect of poverty reduction is unstable, which is related to China’s foreign trade industry. Therefore, how to make better use of the synergy of opening up and urbanization in promoting income increase, and to promote the opening up from labor-intensive to knowledge-based Intensive or technology-intensive transformations, thereby improving the quality of opening to the outside world, are the topics of our team's future research.

 

 

 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

I enjoyed reading the paper ... I have only a minor request af revisions regarding the need to have much more citations of the huge existing literature, especially the most recent one.

Author Response

 Thanks very much for taking your time to review this manuscript. we appreciate your suggestions. Based on your suggestions we have consulted additional literature, and added the content of the literature review, please check our revised version for details.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear Authors, 

Thank you for the corrections. I am happy with the majority of the corrections. Still the manuscript needs editing and polishing not just the text but punctuation and everything. In the abstract, lines 32 and 33, is the manuscript is a summary of a PhD thesis? I suggest you use research project or study instead of "thesis".