Using the national China Household Income Project 2007 urban survey data and a propensity score matching method, this article investigates whether welfare receipt helped enable low-income families to spend more on human capital. We find that welfare recipient families prioritized spending in...

Information asymmetry has traditionally constrained smallholder farmers’ access to markets, consequently limiting their adoption of modern technologies and farm productivity. Improved smallholder farmers’ access to markets via the recent Information and Communication Technology (ICT)...

This paper investigates the interaction of migration, vulnerability to poverty, and welfare of rural households in three provinces in Central Vietnam. It addresses three questions. (1) To what extent do shocks motivate rural household members to move to urban areas?, (2) Are migrants in the new...

This paper evaluates the ex post impact of adopting improved groundnut varieties on crop income and poverty in rural Uganda. The study utilizes cross-sectional data of 927 households, collected in 2006, from seven districts in Uganda. Using propensity score matching methods, we find that...

Summary The objective of the present study is to examine whether household access to microfinance reduces poverty. Using national household data from India, treatment effects model is employed to estimate the poverty-reducing effects of Micro Finance Institutions (MFIs) loans for productive...

Summary This study examines the effect of Japanese aid-funded technical assistance programs on the Indonesian foundry industry funded, applying difference-in-differences propensity score matching estimation to a unique firm-level dataset. The major finding is that the average effect of the aid...

According to advocates, eco-certification can stem environmental damages from tourism in developing countries. Yet we know little about tourism operators’ economic incentives to get certified. To help fill that gap, we use detailed panel data to analyze the Blue Flag beach certification...

This paper analyzes the adoption and welfare impacts of improved maize varieties in eastern Zambia using data obtained from a sample of over 800 farm households. Using both propensity score matching and endogenous switching regression models, the paper shows that adoption of improved maize leads...

We estimate the impact of the New Cooperative Medical Scheme (NCMS) on household savings by income quartiles in rural China. We control for endogenous NCMS participation with an instrumental variable strategy using the China Health and Nutrition survey. We find that NCMS has a negative impact on...

Policymakers have invested billions of dollars over the past two decades on projects which target poverty reduction by institutional mobilization of the poor. Unfortunately, evidence on the efficacy of such projects is few and far between; this is an outcome of the complexity of these projects.