Hidden impact ? Ex-post evaluation of an anti-poverty program

Shaohua Chen and Martin Ravallion

No 3049, Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank

Abstract: By the widely used difference-in-difference method, the Southwest China Poverty Reduction Project had little impact on the proportion of people in beneficiary villages consuming less than $1 a day-despite a public outlay of $400 million. Is that right, or is the true impact being hidden somehow? The authors find that impact estimates are quite sensitive to the choice of outcome indicator, the poverty line, and the matching method. There are larger poverty impacts at lower poverty lines. And there are much larger impacts on incomes than consumptions. Uncertainty about the impact probably made it hard for participants to infer the gain in permanent income, so they saved ahigh proportion of the short-term gain.

Keywords: Poverty Monitoring&Analysis; Economic Theory&Research; Poverty Impact Evaluation; Environmental Economics&Policies; Health Economics&Finance; Environmental Economics&Policies; Poverty Monitoring&Analysis; Inequality; Economic Theory&Research; Poverty Impact Evaluation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2003-05-31
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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