Evaluation de l’impact de l’Initiative Nationale pour le Développement Humain (INDH) sur la pauvreté en milieu rural au Maroc, une étude en enquête panel de ménages

In this paper, we conduct an impact evaluation of a great Moroccan development program of Community Driven Development type, namely the National Human Development Initiative (INDH), which aimed, among others, at fighting against rural poverty. We use data from three waves (2008, 2011 et 2013) of a household panel survey. Given the treatment status identification strategy of rural communes, we have chosen and used the impact evaluation approach of Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD). We estimated the impact of this program on several output indicators: economic outputs (income, consumption and wealth), human development outputs (education and health), multidimensional poverty indicators and self-assessed poverty status indicators. The most important impacts are found for economic outputs, between 2008 and 2011. The program effects seem to dissipate greatly between 2011 and 2013. For human development and multidimensional poverty indicators, our results show a general improvement in 2011 and 2013, in comparison with the reference year (2008). However, those improvements concern both the rural communes targeted, as well as those not targeted by the evaluated program. On the other hand, subjective poverty indicators have deteriorated significantly over time. One should note that the RDD method’s estimates depend strongly upon the selected bandwidth, making certain results not very robust. In addition, several rural control communes, in the sample, have been targeted by the INDH since 2011. Our findings recommend that the INDH, as a CDD, should be improved at the national and local levels coordination, as well as through a greater concentration on key objectives.