Selective targeting and welfare stigma: evidence from China’s urban Dibao programme

China’s urban Dibao program has increasingly relied on stringent eligibility screening mechanisms, such as household inspections, public deliberation, and beneficiary disclosure, to enhance targeting precision. While such selectivity improves poverty alleviation outcomes, an important question remains: does this increased selectivity exacerbate welfare stigma and thereby undermine recipients’ well-being as in Western contexts? Using data from the 2017 National Survey on Low-Income Urban Households, this study applies propensity score matching (PSM) to examine the relationship between participation in urban Dibao and identity stigma, social stigma, and procedural stigma, and further tests the moderating role of program selectivity. The findings suggest limited welfare stigma overall, with more robust evidence for the social- and procedural-stigma results than for the identity-stigma result. Exploratory analyses further show that classical models of welfare-stigma generation have limited explanatory power in the Chinese context. Moreover, the moderating role of selectivity is limited and dimension-specific rather than general. This study provides theoretical and empirical evidence supporting the policy rationale of strengthening selectivity in social assistance programs.