Health Shocks and Household Education Burden—A Study From the Perspective of Relative Poverty Alleviation in China

Health shocks and household education burden influence levels of expenditure on healthcare and education, which are two major non-discretionary expenditures for households. From the perspective of relative poverty alleviation in China and based on the peer effects theory, this study uses the dataset from the rural areas in CFPS database and employs the spatial Durbin model and spatial DID model to investigate—when a household suffers health shocks—the influence of such impact on the education burden of closely related households and to test the effect of single rescue policy in this circumstance. Further, this study employs a spatial mediating effect model to analyze the spatial transmission mechanism. The results indicate that when a household has health shocks, it can aggravate the education burden of closely related households through inter-household social networks. The findings substantiate that the targets of different rescue policies have cross effects and that single rescue policy does not have significant effect on the targets of other policies. To avoid the situation where rescue policies operate in silos and to reduce the internal coordination cost between different policies within a system, a coordinating mechanism should be established between different rescue policies to better alleviate relative poverty.