PMMA-10529 Poverty Targeting and Impact of the National Micro-Credit Program in Vietnam

Abstract

For the purpose of poverty reduction, the Vietnamese Government has launched a national micro-credit program since 1995 to provide the poor with small credit for production without collateral. The Government has spent huge finance in the program. Until September 2005, the total outstanding loans were VND 13428 billion . However, questions on the causal impact of the program remain unanswered so far. Information on poverty targeting and impact evaluation of the program are very helpful in determining whether the program should be expanded, modified or terminated. Traditional literature of program impact evaluation often deals with impact of a binary single program. More specifically, most studies of micro-credit evaluation focus on a single program, and ignore the fact that in developing countries there can be other programs that might also provide micro-credit for some households. There is no guarantee that impact of the other micro-credit programs is uncorrelated with impact of the program to be evaluated. If there is such the correlation, the estimates of the program impact will be biased. The objective of the study is to examine how well the national micro-credit program in Vietnam reaches the poor, and to what extent the program has impact on them using panel data from two Vietnam Household Living Standard Surveys in 2002 and 2004. To measure the program impact, the study employs an instrumental variables method and a nonparametric method of propensity score matching and difference-in-difference and extends the latter to a general context of continuous program variables and multiple-overlapping programs.

Members

Project leader: Cuong Nguyen Viet

Project researchers: Nguyet Pham Minh | Duong Toan | VU THIEU | Minh Thu Pham

Journal publication

Authors	Co-Authors	Title of paper	Title of Economic Review	Bibliographic references
Cuong Nguyen Viet		Poverty Targeting and Impact of the National Micro-Credit Program in Vietnam	The Developing Economies	(2008) XLVI-2 (June 2008): 151-187

Working Papers

	Title	Modified	Size	Comments	Recommendations
	Poverty Targeting and Impact of a Governmental Micro-Credit Program in Vietnam	2007-12-15	891.32KB	0	0

Policy Briefs

	Title	Modified	Size	Comments	Recommendations
	Poverty Targeting and Impact of a Governmental Micro-Credit Program in Vietnam	2008-01-16	34.86KB	0	0

Final report

	Title	Modified	Size	Comments	Recommendations
		2007-08-24	217 KB	0	1

Proposal

	Title	Modified	Size	Comments	Recommendations
		2006-05-16	390 KB	1	0