A remarkable study reached the public last week. It is the first
independent, rigorous, firsthand evaluation of the Millennium Villages
Project (MVP), an effort by the United Nations and Columbia University
whose admirable goal was to show that “the poorest regions of rural Africa can lift
themselves out of extreme poverty in five year’s time.” The new study
shows that the MVP is far from reaching that goal at its flagship site
Working on her own, without the
collaboration or endorsement of the MVP, Kenyan economist Bernadette
Wanjala of Tilburg University collected data on households in or near
the site at Sauri, Kenya, where the project was launched in 2005. She
interviewed 236 randomly-selected households that had been exposed to
the MVP’s large package of agriculture projects, education programs,
infrastructure improvements, and health/sanitation works. She also
interviewed 175 randomly-selected households from an area of the same
district (called Gem) that was not exposed to the intervention. ...
In their just-released paper,
Wanjala and her colleague Roldan Muradian of Radboud University use
the new survey data to measure the project’s impact on poverty. They
carefully compare treated and untreated households that were otherwise
similar in many ways—such as household composition, adults’ education,
fertility, economic sector, and land holdings. Because this project is
large and intensive, spending on the order of 100% of local income per capita, it is reasonable to hope that it might substantially raise recipients’ incomes, at least in the short term.
Wanjala and Muradian find that the project had no significant impact on recipients’ incomes.
How is this possible? While Wanjala and Muradian find that the project
caused a 70% increase in agricultural productivity among the treated
households, tending to increase household income, it also caused less
diversification of household economic activity into profitable non-farm
employment, tending to decrease household income. These countervailing
effects are precisely what one might expect from a large and intensive
subsidy to agricultural activity. On balance, households that received
this large and intensive intervention have no more income today than
households that did not receive the intervention.
--Michael Clemens, Center for Global Development, on another big-push development failure. HT: Marginal Revolution
UPDATE: See a skeptical appraisal of the Muradian and Wanjala paper by Chris Blattman here.
