Has Rural Infrastructure Rehabilitation in Georgia Helped the Poor?
This article proposes a research strategy to deal with the scarcity of data on beneficiaries for conducting impact assessments of community-level projects. Community-level panel data from a regular household survey augmented with a special communit...
| Main Authors: | , |
|---|---|
| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank
2014
|
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2005/05/17747853/rural-infrastructure-rehabilitation-georgia-helped-poor http://hdl.handle.net/10986/16476 |
| Summary: | This article proposes a research
strategy to deal with the scarcity of data on beneficiaries
for conducting impact assessments of community-level
projects. Community-level panel data from a regular
household survey augmented with a special community module
are used to measure the impact of projects. Propensity
score-matched difference in-difference comparisons are used
to control for time-invariant unobservable factors. This
methodology takes into consideration the purposeful
placement of projects and their interactions at the
community level. This empirical approach is applied to
infrastructure rehabilitation projects, for schools, roads,
and water supply systems, in rural Georgia between 1998 and
2001. The analysis produces plausible results regarding the
size of welfare gains from a particular project at the
village level and allows for differentiation of benefits
between the poor and the non-poor. The findings of this
study can contribute to evaluations of the impact of
infrastructure interventions on poverty by bringing new
empirical evidence to bear on the welfare and equity implications. |
|---|