Fiscal support for grassland ecological restoration and multidimensional poverty alleviation in farming and pastoral areas — Evidence from Inner Mongolia, China

Grassland ecological protection and restoration play a basic and strategic role in safeguarding national ecological security, border stability, ethnic unity, promoting ecological civilization construction, and realizing rural revitalization in pastoral areas.From the perspective of fairness, based on the panel data of 84 banner counties in Inner Mongolia from 2015 to 2020, combined with the welfare economy theory and the actual development of the grassland area, this paper uses the fixed-effect model and the first-order difference GMM model to analyze the intermediary effects through the structural equation model. The results show that: (1) There is an inverted U-shaped relationship between financial support for grassland ecological restoration and relative poverty alleviation. (2) The results of heterogeneity analysis show that the scale and structure of different types of fiscal expenditure have heterogeneity on the relative poverty reduction effect. (3) The fiscal expenditure policy of grassland ecological restoration exerts a mediating effect on the relative poverty effect through economic growth. Based on this, in the stage of precise poverty alleviation, financial support for grassland ecological restoration to solve the problem of relative poverty in the region is still a long way to go, and the construction of a long-term mechanism of "supporting the will and the wisdom" is the key to alleviate multidimensional relative poverty.