Spatial point pattern analysis on the villages in China's poverty-stricken areas

In 2011, there are more than 100 million poor people in China and they are mainly distributed in fourteen large poverty-stricken areas. China has been viewing the development-oriented poverty reduction work for the purpose of eliminating poverty as state-level strategic target, and the poverty reduction will play an important role in the new round of urbanization of China. To meet the requirement of Entire-village Advancement in Outline for Development-oriented Poverty Reduction for China's Rural Areas (2011-2020), this paper first analyzes the spatial pattern variation characteristics of the villages with the change of distance in each poverty-stricken area by Ripley's K function and estimates the spatial pattern of villages in each county by Average Nearest Neighbor ratio. Then the relationships between poverty-stricken villages and their impact factors of DEM, water, railway and main-road are investigated. Results provide a good understanding of village's spatial pattern in different poverty-stricken areas and counties and relationships between village distribution and its impact factors, which provides an important decision basis for Entire-village Advancement in poverty reduction. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V