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Assessment of the disaster resilience index (DRI) is an effective decision support tool for managing natural disasters. This study holds that disaster resilience is a dynamic process accompanied by coping capacity, adaptive capacity, and transformative capacity in different phases; therefore, we develop a three-dimensional capacity-based framework using seven indicators (including 38 subindicators) to map the multigoals for measuring resilience at the household level. Our data were acquired through questionnaire responses by 516 representative rural households in mountainous hazard-prone areas in Chongqing, China. The results reveal that more households are deemed "low resilience" and that geographical spatial differences exist in the DRI across the case regions. Several factors affecting the ability to survive, bounce back, and bounce forward from mountain hazards for rural households were found in China. The framework constructed in this paper offers a new perspective for a holistic understanding of disaster resilience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Strategies aimed towards poverty alleviation need to identify factors that are strongly associated with poverty. The objective of the study was to analyse the determinants of rural absolute and relative poverty in Shouning County, Fujian Province, Southeast China. Two binary logistic regressions were estimated based on household survey data in which the dependent variables were whether the residents were living in poverty, and the explanatory variables included a set of socioeconomic and demographic variables. The results showed that the age of the household head, dependency ratio, number of chronic patients, pressure of educational expenses, and culture of poverty were significantly and positively associated with the likelihood of being in absolute poverty. However, a greater household size and better accessibility to information decreased the probability of being in this state. The strongest four predictors of absolute poverty in descending order were information accessibility, number of chronic patients, pressure of educational expenses, and culture of poverty. In terms of relative poverty, our results demonstrated that elevation, cropland per capita, age of household head, number of chronic patients, pressure of educational expenses, and distance to the county seat had significant positive relationships with the probability of being trapped in relative poverty, whereas information accessibility was negatively associated with being in relative poverty. The strongest four predictors of relative poverty in descending order were information accessibility, pressure of educational expenses, cropland per capita, and number of chronic patients. Generally, the results confirmed three important determinants of rural poverty hypothesised in previous studies: chronic illness-induced poverty, educational expenses-induced poverty, and culture of poverty. We expect that the results of this study will provide useful insight for future research of rural poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Employing data from the China rural-urban mobility survey conducted in 2010, this study investigates the influence of family demographic characteristics on the income, life satisfaction, and potential for rural-urban mobility at the rural household level of two provinces of China: Shaanxi and Henan. A larger labor force in a rural household was found to reduce a family's ability or inclination to move to a city. The findings reveal that family size negatively affects the average income per family member and reduces the marginal income of the labor force and that minor children can improve the life satisfaction of family members. We conclude that a larger family size does not translate to more benefits for a rural household. Family size preference is found to be a reflection of parents' concerns about elderly care and is deemed to be unfavorable for urbanization in P. R. China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]