Are there lasting impacts of China’s anti-poverty program? A synthetic control analysis

Huiqiong Duan

Applied Economics, 2025, vol. 57, issue 54, 9035-9069

Abstract: China’s National Poor Counties (NPCs) program represents one of the largest anti-poverty efforts ever undertaken in a developing country. In spite of this, no causal analysis has been undertaken to examine whether regions in poverty at the end of the program actually achieve sustainable growth after support is removed. This paper provides the first long-term analysis of China’s NPCs (National Poor Counties) program on local development, investigating whether poor regions continue to develop economically after exiting the anti-poverty program. Focusing on the period 1986 to 2010, I construct plausible counterfactuals for counties that participated and graduated from the NPCs registry using the synthetic control method. This exercise reveals several new insights. First, on average, graduates of China’s anti-poverty program exhibit roughly the same growth outcomes as those still receiving support from the program. Second, I show that focusing on the average impact masks sizable heterogeneity when disaggregating to a case by case analysis of counties. Importantly, for the subset of counties which graduated from the first wave of the poverty reduction program in 1993, there is a demonstrably faster expansion post-graduation. For more recent county’s graduating from the program, however, I find significantly lower income growth of NPCs program completion in the long run.

Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1080/00036846.2024.2393451

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