Has China’s last poverty alleviation effort, the one that claimed to have finally eradicated extreme poverty, ended up just giving away fish or did it really teach people how to fish?
Huifu Nong of the Guangdong University of Finance writing in a Discussion Paper Series for the Deutsche Post Foundation assisted IZA Institute of Labor Economics has taken a closer look at the question via the lens of the subsequent academic performance of children from assisted households.
The good news is there has been a manifest uplift in the academic performance of children from households assisted in the program. However, this top-line good news masks the key point that it was only girls whose performance stepped up.
The researchers stop short of suggesting why the improvement should have been so lopsided but I’d suggest boys were already being preferred and extra revenue allowed for a more equitable distribution of resources?
The research concludes this work should be seen as merely a starting point for more studies to see whether these benefits stick over time and how this latest assisted cohort, as a group, fares into the future i.e will they keep catching the fish?
For China wonks there’s a fascinating aside in Appendix B (from P.29) on the specifics of how families were encouraged to take up new and economically productive activities.
You can access the paper in full by via this link Advantage Girls.
Happy Sunday.