Multidimensional poverty among rural adults in China: regional disparities and measurement sensitivity in the 2020 and 2022 CFPS waves

Abstract China's transition beyond extreme-poverty eradication raises a measurement-governance question: which disadvantages still overlap among rural adults, and who becomes visible when poverty is defined beyond income alone? This study analyses 7,717 adults in the 2022 China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) and reconstruct the same five-dimension Alkire-Foster index among 8,754 adults in 2020. At k = 1/3, survey-weighted poverty incidence was 35.39% in 2022 and 37.00% in 2020. The relative-income and multidimensional rules identified substantially different populations: 17.95% of rural adults in 2022 were multidimensionally poor without being income poor, compared with 17.44% poor under both rules; within the multidimensional-only group, reported household solid-fuel deprivation was pivotal to crossing the two-deprivation threshold for 47.82%. The corresponding 2020 estimates were 20.78%, 16.22% and 49.36%. Education remained the largest and most rank-stable contributor, Western incidence exceeded Eastern incidence by about 15 percentage points in both waves, and unrestricted entropy weighting reduced incidence by 12.76–16.29 points. Rural poverty monitoring should therefore report identification overlap, deprivation composition, uncertainty and specification sensitivity alongside any headline rate.