Has Rural Infrastructure Rehabilitation in Georgia Helped the Poor?

By Michael Lokshin, Ruslan G. Yemtsov. 2005

178 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This article proposes a research strategy to deal with the scarcity of data on beneficiaries for conducting impact assessments of community-level projects. Community-level panel data from a regular household survey augmented with a special community module are used to measure the impact of projects. Propensity score-matched difference in-difference comparisons are used to control for time-invariant unobservable factors. This methodology takes into consideration the purposeful placement of projects and their interactions at the community level. This empirical approach is applied to infrastructure rehabilitation projects, for schools, roads, and water supply systems, in rural Georgia between 1998 and 2001. The analysis produces plausible results regarding the size of welfare gains from a particular project at the village level and allows for differentiation of benefits between the poor and the non-poor. The findings of this study can contribute to evaluations of the impact of infrastructure interventions on poverty by bringing new empirical evidence to bear on the welfare and equity implications.

Subfields: Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law, Nutrition and Dietetics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/07ced79231f23cc9967dd7fb1485906fb78583ee

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

1. Dominique van de Walle
2. R. Mu
3. L. Serven
4. C. Calderón

In Nutrition and Dietetics

1. Dominique van de Walle
2. R. Mu
3. L. Serven
4. C. Calderón

In Sociology and Political Science

1. Dominique van de Walle
2. R. Mu
3. L. Serven
4. C. Calderón
5. S. Law
6. Martin Huber
7. Markus Frölich
8. V. Borooah

Citations in the corpus

• Infrastructure, growth, and inequality : an overview (2014, background): “Granting access to new and improved roads in rural areas has also expanded the set of opportunities in non-agricultural activities in Peru (Escobal and Ponce 2008) and in non-farm activities among women in Georgia (Lokshin and Yemtsov 2005).”
• Rural Roads and Poor Area Development in Vietnam (2007, background): “1 For example see Gannon and Liu (1997); Khandker et al. (2005); Escobal and Ponce (2004); Dercon et al. (2006); Jacoby (2001), Jacoby and Minten (2007); Lokshin and Yemtsov (2005).”
• Rural Roads and Local Market Development in Vietnam (2011, background): “See, for example, Gannon and Liu (1997), Escobal and Ponce (2004), Lokshin and Yemtsov (2005), Dercon et al. (2006) and Khandker et al. (2009).”