Publication: Are There Lessons for Africa from China's Success against Poverty?
Abstract
At the outset of China's reform period, the country had a far higher poverty rate than Africa as a whole. Within five years that was no longer true. This paper tries to explain how China escaped from a situation in which extreme poverty persisted due to failed and unpopular policies. While acknowledging that Africa faces constraints that China did not, two lessons for Africa stand out. The first is the initial importance of productivity growth in smallholder agriculture, which will require both market-based incentives and public support. The second is the role played by strong leadership and a capable public administration at all levels of government.
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Publication Are There Lessons for Africa from China's Success Against Poverty?(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2008-01)At the outset of China's reform period, the country had a far higher poverty rate than for Africa as a whole. Within five years that was no longer true. This paper tries to explain how China escaped from a situation in which extreme poverty persisted due to failed and unpopular policies. While acknowledging that Africa faces constraints that China did not, and that context matters, two lessons stand out. The first is the importance of productivity growth in smallholder agriculture, which will require both market-based incentives and public support. The second is the role played by strong leadership and a capable public administration at all levels of government.Publication Health Service Delivery in China : A Literature Review(2008)We report the results of a review of the Chinese- and English-language literatures on service delivery in China, asking how well China's health-care providers perform and what determines their performance. Although data and methodological limitations suggest caution in drawing conclusions, a critical reading of the available evidence suggests that current health service delivery in China leaves room for improvement, in terms of quality, responsiveness to patients, efficiency, cost escalation, and equity. The literature suggests that these problems will not be solved by simply shifting ownership to the private sector or by simply encouraging providers--public and private--to compete with one another for individual patients. By contrast, substantial improvements could be (and in some places have already been) made by changing the way providers are paid--shifting away from fee-for-service and the distorted price schedule. Other elements of active purchasing by insurers could further improve outcomes. Rigorous evaluations, based on richer micro-level data, could considerably strengthen the evidence base for service delivery policy in China.Publication China is Poorer than we Thought, But No Less Successful in the Fight Against Poverty(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2008-05)In 2005, China participated for the first time in the International Comparison Program (ICP), which collects primary data across countries on the prices for an internationally comparable list of goods and services. This paper examines the implications of the new Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) rate (derived by the ICP) for China's poverty rate (by international standards) and how it has changed over time. We provide estimates with and without adjustment for a likely sampling bias in the ICP data. Using an international poverty line of USD 1.25 at 2005 PPP, we find a substantially higher poverty rate for China than past estimates, with about 15% of the population living in consumption poverty, implying about 130 million more poor by this standard. The income poverty rate in 2005 is 10%, implying about 65 million more people living in poverty. However, the new ICP data suggest an even larger reduction in the number of poor since 1981.Publication Miss-targeted or Miss-measured?(2008)A method is proposed for testing the robustness of the assessed targeting performance of an anti-poverty program to the fact that program administrators have a broader concept of "poverty" than the economist/evaluator. An application is given to China's main urban anti-poverty program.Publication Securing Property Rights in Transition: Lessons from Implementation of China's Rural Land Contracting Law(2009)Motivated by the emphasis on secure property rights as a determinant of economic development in recent literature, we use village- and household-level information from about 800 villages throughout China to explore whether legal reform increased protection of land rights against unauthorized reallocation or expropriation with below-average compensation by the state. In addition to providing nation-wide evidence on a sensitive topic, we find positive impacts, equivalent increasing land values by 30 percent, of reform even in the short term that originated in villages where democratic election of leaders ensured a minimum level of accountability, pointing towards complementarity between good governance and legal reform. Implications for situations where individuals and groups hold overlapping rights to land are explored.
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