Are the poor benefiting from China's land conservation program?

By E. Uchida, Jintao Xu, Zhigang Xu, Scott Rozelle. Environment and Development Economics, 2007

222 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper studies the impact of the largest conservation set-aside program in the developing world: China's Grain for Green program, on poverty alleviation in rural areas. Based on a large-scale survey, we find that the program was implemented mostly in the areas of China that are fairly poor. In addition, we show that income from livestock activities and some types of asset holdings of participants have increased significantly more than those of non-participants (due to program effects). Only weak evidence is provided demonstrating that participating households have begun to shift their labor into the off-farm sectors. Overall, the results suggest that the program has been moderately successful in achieving its poverty alleviation objectives.

Subfields: General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Global and Planetary Change, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/29c31df0f2158939a560c104142d80142c54e199

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Citations in the corpus

Parks versus PES: Evaluating direct and incentive-based land conservation in Mexico (2017, unknown): “Research on China’s payments for reforestation programs traces possible increases in welfare through additional assets and reallocation of labor to off-farm opportunities (Uchida et al. 2007, 2009).”
China’s conversion of cropland to forest program: a systematic review of the environmental and socioeconomic effects (2016, unknown): “In the CCFP pilot region (Shaanxi, Gansu, and Sichuan), a series of papers describe a shift in the allocation of labor in sloping landscapes from agriculture, initially to on-farm livestock investment, followed by an increase in off-farm jobs [23, 24, 52, 53].”
Only One Tree from Each Seed? Environmental Effectiveness and Poverty Alleviation in Mexico's Payments for Ecosystem Services Program (2015, methodology): “To date, household impacts have been studied using predictions based on the cross-sectional composition of the participant group or by comparing outcomes over time between participants and a control group composed of nonparticipants from the general population (Pfaff et al. 2007; Uchida et al. 2007;”
China's sloping land conversion program: Institutional innovation or business as usual? (2008, methodology): “Uchida et al. (2004) and Xu et al. (2005) also find little evidence in the 2003 survey that poorer households within the areas where SLCP is being implemented are being predominantly targeted.”
The Sustainability of Agricultural Development in China: The Agriculture–Environment Nexus (2018, background): “2 million hectares of cropland already retired [69,70].”
How sustainable are sustainable development programs? The case of the sloping land conversion program in China. (2009, background): “Some preliminary evidence from the work by Bennett et al. (2004), Uchida et al. (2005) and Uchida et al. (2007), Uchida, Xu, Xu, and Rozelle (2005), and Xu and Cao (2002) suggests that the SLCP impact on participating household income levels and on shifts to noncrop related income generating…”
The Sloping Land Conversion Program in China: Effect on the Livelihood Diversification of Rural Households (2015, background): “These results are consistent with some previous findings, where the SLCP was not successful in shifting labor to offfarm sectors during its first few years of implementation (Uchida et al., 2007; Xu et al., 2004), but participation in off-farm activities increased more for participants than nonparti”
Notions of Justice in Payments for Ecosystem Services:Insights from China’s Sloping Land Conversion Program in Yunnan Province (2015, background): “This general match between the SLCP and broader livelihood dynamics sets Yangliu apart from other places where implementation has had an overall negative effect on local livelihoods (Uchida et al., 2007; Chen et al., 2009; Ma et al., 2009; Li et al., 2011).”
Payment for Ecosystem Services from Forests (2014, unknown): “Uchida et al. (2007), using matching between participants and nonparticipants, find SLCP participants to have greater livestock assets after the program relative to nonparticipants.”
China’s Sloping Land Conversion Program: Does Expansion Equal Success? (2010, background): “The only rigorous analysis of program impact to date is by Uchida et al. (2007), who used propensity scoring matching to evaluate the social and economic impacts of the program.”