Impact Analysis Of Rural Road On Poverty Reduction

Dealing with poverty issues, this dissertation falls into category of social sciences and agricultural economics management. The dissertation is an empirical study on the impact of rural road program upon poverty reduction.The Chinese government attaches great importance to the impact of road programs in poverty-stricken regions on economic development and poverty reduction. West development, in particular, has put rural infrastructure construction into an unprecedented bloom. However, how much impact does infrastructure construction including road produce on poverty reduction in poverty-stricken regions? What are those channels by which the poverty reduction impact being produced? What are the beneficiary groups? How about the efficiency of poverty reduction investment? These are the issues among many others that need serious analysis and evaluation. This will generate crucial impact on important government decisions on the scale, direction and target of poverty reduction investment, whereas evaluation and analysis work on poverty reduction programs in China remains to be strengthened.The purpose of the dissertation is to analyze the impact of road program carried out between 2001 and 2004 on poverty reduction in the five poverty-stricken districts (counties) of Chongqing. The dissertation mainly adopts quantitative analysis methods including double-difference comparison, participatory evaluation and econometric model. Double-difference analysis method can nicely wipe off other factors' impact on poverty reduction by comparing program village and control village, therefore this method is used for descriptive analysis of household changes brought about by road programs in program village. Participatory evaluation method is introduced to interpret the background and process which produce those outputs in descriptive analysis and make the results more convincing. In addition, econometric model can control the impact of other investment on poverty reduction since all other village investment data including road investment is available, thus the poverty reduction impact of road investment can be estimated more scientifically and exactly. The econometric method can also verify results from descriptive analysis. Data for the dissertation comes from two-round household surveys for 619 households, three case surveys and village investment survey conducted in 2001 and 2004.Four major analysis conclusions come out. Firstly, road program greatly improved poverty situations of program village. Poverty incidence, poverty depth index and poverty severity index declined significantly compared to control village. Secondly, changes in the poor population are the greatest. In term of changes, the poor were the supreme beneficiary of road program. Thirdly, road program reduced poverty by way of enhancing agricultural productivity, facilitating emigrate employment for rural household especially poor households, promoting private business, and improving development capability for rural households. Fourthly, constructing rural roads in the five poor districts (counties) in Wuling mountain of Chongqing can receive relatively high returns.These conclusions have important policy implications, namely, construction of low-grademountain roads in poor mountain areas can obtain relatively high returns in term of increasing household income and have notable effects on poverty reduction. Therefore, government should give priority to construction of village road and within village road with low-grade technique and investment requirements in infrastructure investment strategies in the movement of new socialist countryside. Better poverty reduction effects are expected to achieve even with limited fund and shorter time since these roads are closely related to household life and production.