Dr. Yulun Xie recently had a paper published in the Journal of Development Economics. The paper titled‘Across a few prohibitive miles: The impact of the Anti-Poverty Relocation Program in China’, was coauthored with Li Zhang from Department of Economics, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Xinye Zheng from School of Applied Economics, Renmin University of China. 

Abstract

Many households are confined to remote rural villages in the developing world. This study examines the Anti-Poverty Relocation Program in China, considering the village-to-town relocation from agricultural to non- agricultural sectors induced by the program. While exploring a novel administrative data set on impoverished people in a Chinese county, we discovered that the program significantly increased the participants’ income by 9.61%, driven mainly by the increase in wage income. The empirical findings are consistent with the Roy- model perspective, which states that rural households with comparative advantage in non-agricultural sectors could benefit from relocation to nearby towns. This study provides new evidence that mobility barriers across sectors exist even on a small geographic scale in rural areas. The results of the cost–benefit analysis suggest that relocation of households in remote rural areas is a feasible policy tool for overcoming such mobility barriers.

Other information

Publication Date:2022

Journal:Journal of Development Economics

Journal Issue: 160（2023）

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jdeveco.2022.102945

Read the paper here.