Measurement of Common Prosperity of Chinese Rural Households Using Graded Response Models: Evidence from Zhejiang Province

Common prosperity is an important feature of Chinese-style modernization. The difficulty and focus of promoting the construction of common prosperity in China lies in rural areas and rural households. How to evaluate the common prosperity of rural households is becoming an important research topic. Based on the perspective of meeting the people’s needs for a better life, this study designed 14 items or indicators from the dimensions of affluence, commonality, and sustainability. The common prosperity of rural households is regarded as a potential structure. Based on the survey data of 615 rural households in Zhejiang Province, graded response models were used to estimate the discrimination and difficulty coefficient, and an indicator selection and characteristics analysis were carried out. The research results show that there are 13 items suitable for measuring the common prosperity of rural households, and these indicators have strong distinguishing ability. However, different dimension indicators have different functions. In particular, the affluence dimension, the sharing dimension, and the sustainability dimension are suitable for distinguishing families with a relatively high level of common prosperity, a medium level of common prosperity, and a low level of common prosperity, respectively. Based on this, we propose policy recommendations such as building diversified governance strategies, formulating differentiated governance policies, and supporting the corresponding basic policy reform.