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The World Bank Economic Review Advance Access published online on January 30, 2009
The World Bank Economic Review, doi:10.1093/wber/lhn023
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development / THE WORLD BANK. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Decentralizing Eligibility for a Federal Antipoverty Program: A Case Study for China

Martin Ravallion

Correspondence: Email address is mravallion{at}worldbank.org

JEL codes: H70, I32, I38, O18

In theory, the informational advantage of decentralizing the eligibility criteria for a federal antipoverty program could come at a large cost to the program's performance in reaching the poor nationally. Whether this happens in practice depends on the size of the local-income effect on the eligibility cutoffs. China's Di Bao program provides a case study. Poorer municipalities adopt systematically lower thresholds—roughly negating intercity differences in need for the program and generating considerable horizontal inequity, so that poor families in rich cities fare better. The income effect is not strong enough to undermine the program's overall poverty impact; other factors, including incomplete coverage of those eligible, appear to matter more.


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