Are there lasting impacts of aid to poor areas

By Shaohua Chen, R. Mu, M. Ravallion. 2009

114 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The paper re-visits the site of a large, World Bank-financed, rural development program in China, 10years 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 2000 households in project and non-project areas, spanning 10years. 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 small and statistically insignificant gains to mean consumption emerged in the longer-term -- though in rough accord with the average gain to permanent income. The use of community-based beneficiary selection greatly reduced the overall impact, given that the educated poor were under-covered. 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.

Subfields: Development, Economics and Econometrics, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c419dc3eb3bd97e8ab1c9de02bcbe890619eff23

How researchers see this paper

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

In Development

1. Dominique van de Walle
2. R. Mu
3. Lingsheng Meng
4. Kathleen G. Beegle

In Economics and Econometrics

1. Dominique van de Walle
2. R. Mu
3. Lingsheng Meng
4. Kathleen G. Beegle
5. M. Ravallion

In Safety Research

1. Dominique van de Walle
2. R. Mu
3. Lingsheng Meng
4. Kathleen G. Beegle

Citations in the corpus

• Direct and Indirect Effects of Malawi's Public Works Program on Food Security (2015, background): “If households behave according to the predictions of the permanent income hypothesis (PIH), then the temporary increase in income will be allocated to consumption in all future periods, and the change in consumption in any one period would be diminishingly small, as in Chen et al. (2009). This could”
• Evaluating China's poverty alleviation program: A regression discontinuity approach (2013, background): “Admittedly, evenwith a valid regression discontinuity design, biases in the estimates can arise from interference because of spillover effects through local public finance (Chen et al., 2009).”
• Timing and Duration of Exposure in Evaluations of Social Programs (2008, unknown): “…long-term impacts could point to valuable lessons about the diffusion of good practices over time (Foster and Rosenzweig 1995) or, sadly, how governments can reduce impact by implementing other policies that (perhaps unintentionally) disadvantage the program areas (Chen, Mu, and Ravallion 2008).”
• Rural Roads and Local Market Development in Vietnam (2011, background): “In one of the few cases in which impacts of a poor area development project (including rural roads) were tracked over time, the impacts declined rather than showing cumulative gains (Chen et al., 2009).”