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Are there lasting impacts of aid to poor areas ? Evidence from rural China

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Author Info
Chen, Shaohua
Mu, Ren
Ravallion, Martin

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Abstract

The paper revisits the siteof a large, World Bank-financed, rural development program in China 10 years after it began and four years after disbursements ended. The program emphasized community participation in multi-sectoral interventions (including farming, animal husbandry, infrastructure and social services). Data were collected on 2,000 households in project and nonproject areas, spanning 10 years. A double-difference estimator of the program's impact (on top of pre-existing governmental programs) reveals sizeable short-term income gains that were mostly saved. Only modest gains to mean consumption emerged in the longer term-in rough accord with the gain to permanent income. Certain types of households gained more than others. The educated poor were under-covered by the community-based selection process-greatly reducing overall impact. The main results are robust to corrections for various sources of selection bias, including village targeting and interference due to spillover effects generated by the response of local governments to the external aid.

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Paper provided by The World Bank in its series Policy Research Working Paper Series with number 4084.

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Date of creation: 01 Mar 2008
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Handle: RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:4084

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Related research
Keywords: Rural Poverty Reduction; Access to Finance; Poverty Monitoring&Analysis; Economic Theory&Research;

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  19. Richard K. Crump & V. Joseph Hotz & Guido W. Imbens & Oscar A. Mitnik, 2006. "Moving the Goalposts: Addressing Limited Overlap in the Estimation of Average Treatment Effects by Changing the Estimand," NBER Technical Working Papers 0330, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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