Abstract: The Rural Minimum Living Standard Guarantee (Rural Dibao) System is both a core component of China’s normalized mechanism for preventing poverty relapse and new poverty onset, and a key pillar for delivering stratified and categorized assistance to rural low-income groups. To systematically examine how the Rural Dibao System affects household economic resilience, this paper exploits the system’s entry-exit mechanism as a quasi-natural experiment. Using four waves of the China Household Finance Survey (CHFS) data from 2013, 2015, 2017 and 2019, the empirical analysis demonstrates that Dibao enrollment significantly enhances household economic resilience. Mechanism tests reveal that health security, education security and housing security are the primary channels through which Dibao participation boosts household economic resilience. Heterogeneity analysis finds that the improvement effect of Dibao enrollment exhibits significant regional and household heterogeneity, being more pronounced in eastern China and among lower-income households. The moderation analysis reveals that the subsidy level positively moderates the effect of Dibao access on household economic resilience, such that a higher subsidy amount is associated with a stronger positive effect. Further analysis indicates that Dibao exit does not induce a statistically significant decline in household economic resilience, and the positive effect of the health security channel persists over time. Accordingly, policy efforts should focus on three key dimensions: refining Dibao entry criteria, instituting a tailored exit support mechanism, and enhancing the synergy of stratified and categorical assistance. Such an approach would help steer the Dibao system beyond mere subsistence protection toward a resilience-building governance model, thereby reinforcing the institutional bulwark against poverty recurrence.

Key words: Rural Minimum Living Standard Guarantee (Rural Dibao) System, household economic resilience, Dibao enrollment, Dibao exit