We investigate the impact of a large-scale poverty alleviation program targeted at 62 poorest districts in Vietnam, analyzing multiple datasets spanning the past 20 years with a regression discontinuity design with district fixed effects. While we do not find significant program effects on household welfare (as measured by per capita income and poverty) and local economic development (as measured by nighttime light intensity and establishment of new firms), we find that the program facilitates a shift from farm to nonfarm employment and significantly increases the share of nonfarm income for rural households. One possible explanation for the positive effects on nonfarm employment is the improved access to credit that the program provides to participating households. We also find that the program increases household access to electricity, public transfer, educational subsidies for students residing in the program districts, and healthcare utilization, possibly through improving availability of commune healthcare centers.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.