The debate over whether boarding school is beneficial for students still exists in both developing and developed countries. In rural China, as a result of a national school merger program that began in 2001, the number of boarding students has increased dramatically. Little research has been done, however, to measure how boarding status may be correlated with nutrition, health and educational outcomes. In this paper, we compare the outcomes of boarding to those of non-boarding students using a large, aggregate dataset that includes 59 rural counties across five provinces in China. We fi nd that for all outcomes boarding students perform worse than non-boarding students. Despite these differences, the absolute levels of all outcomes are low for both boarding and non-boarding students, indicating a need for new policies that will target all rural students regardless of their boarding status.

Nearly nine years following the release of the Center for Global Development’s When Will We Ever Learn? Improving Lives Through Impact Evaluation report, and almost a decade into increased focus on evaluation among global donors, many in the research community are reflecting on the state of the impact evaluation field, whether the development community is learning what was hoped to from impact evaluations and where the future of impact evaluation leads. 

As part of this reflection, in this paper we will explore the recent past, current status and future of impact evaluation of development interventions. 

The lost decades for China in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s look remarkably like the lost decades of Africa in the 1980s an 1990s.  Poor land rights, weak incentives, incomplete markets and inappropriate investment portfolios.  However, China burst out of its stagnation in the 1980s and has enjoyed three decades of remarkable growth.  In this paper we examine the record of the development of China's food economy and identify the policies that helped generate the growth and transformation of agriculture.  Incentives, markets and strategic investments by the state were key.  Equally important, however, is what the state did not do.  Policies that worked and those that failed (or those that were ignored) are addressed.  Most importantly, we try to take an objective, nuanced look at the lessons that might be learned and those that are not relevant for Africa.  Many parts of Africa have experienced positive growth during the past decade.  We examine if there are any lessons that might be helpful in turning ten positive years into several more decades of transformation.

New research on the political economy of policy-induced distortions to incentives for optimal resource use in agriculture and insights from the study of the dramatic reforms in former state-controlled economy has led to enhanced insights on the role of governance structures on policy making in agricultural and natural resources. This paper reviews these research developments and key new insights.

Drawing on a survey of 106 secondary vocational schools and 7309 students in two provinces of China, this descriptive paper assesses whether vocational schooling is measuring up to government benchmarks for quality and whether poor students are able to access quality schools. We find that secondary vocational schools have met government benchmarks for teacher qualification and training, student opportunities for practical training and adequate facilities. Furthermore, poor students access schools of similar quality to non-poor students, even though 34 percent of poor students do not receive financial aid. We conclude that recent policies are successfully ensuring secondary vocational school quality and equity of access to school quality between poor and non-poor students. However, financial aid policies should be re-examined, such that poor students receive sufficient coverage. Moreover, given that input-based measures only proxy school quality, the government should consider holding schools accountable for outcomes such as student learning.

Can the BRIC university systems greatly increase the quantity of graduates in these developing countries and simultaneously achieve high enough quality to compete successfully at the higher end of the global knowledge economy?

The rapid expansion of enrollment capacity in China’s colleges since the late 1990s has come at the price of high tuition hikes. China’s government has put forth financial aid programs to enable poor students to access higher education. Although studies have shown that poor high school students are indeed able to attend college when their test scores are high enough (that is, few are unable to attend when they are qualified to attend), the literature has not explored whether poor students have sufficient amounts of aid to thrive in college.

 Using findings from a randomized controlled trial, this study evaluates the impact of providing full scholarships to students from poor rural areas (henceforth treatment students) on student stress levels, self-esteem/self-efficacy, and participation in activities in four first-tier colleges. To do so, we compare outcomes of the treatment students with students who were not given full scholarships by the project (and were left to search for scholarships and other sources of financial aid from the university system itself—the control students). The project was run among the 200 poorest first-year students in four first-tier colleges in inland China. Somewhat surprisingly, we find that treatment students (those receiving full scholarships from the project) were only slightly more successful in obtaining financial aid than control students. This suggests that control students (those who did not receive full scholarships from the project) were still able to access comparable levels of financial aid. Most importantly, scholarship recipients were statistically identical in outcome to control students in terms of stress, self-esteem, and participation in college activities, suggesting that poor students (who are dependent on aid from the university system) currently are able to access sufficient levels of financial aid, are able to take advantage of the activities offered at college, and do not shoulder heavy financial or psychological costs.

 We find, therefore, that efforts of the government to alleviate the financial burden of college on the poor have been relatively successful in first-tier colleges. Because of this, foundations and individuals may decide that if they want to improve human welfare, giving additional scholarships at high tier colleges may be having little effect. 

Objectives: To determine whether China's New Rural Cooperative Medical Scheme (NCMS), which aims to provide health insurance to 800 million rural citizens and to correct distortions in rural primary care, and the individual policy attributes have affected the operation and use of village health clinics.

Design: We performed a difference-in-difference analysis using multivariate linear regressions, controlling for clinic and individual attributes as well as village and year effects.

Setting: 100 villages within 25 rural counties across five Chinese provinces in 2004 and 2007.

Participants: 160 village primary care clinics and 8339 individuals.

Main outcome measures: Clinic outcomes were log average weekly patient flow, log average monthly gross income, log total annual net income, and the proportion of monthly gross income from medicine sales. Individual outcomes were probability of seeking medical care, log annual "out of pocket" health expenditure, and two measures of exposure to financial risk (probability of incurring out of pocket health expenditure above the 90th percentile of spending among the uninsured and probability of financing medical care by borrowing or selling assets).

Results: For village clinics, we found that NCMS was associated with a 26% increase in weekly patient flow and a 29% increase in monthly gross income, but no change in annual net revenue or the proportion of monthly income from drug revenue. For individuals, participation in NCMS was associated with a 5% increase in village clinic use, but no change in overall medical care use. Also, out of pocket medical spending fell by 19% and the two measures of exposure to financial risk declined by 24-63%. These changes occurred across heterogeneous county programmes, even in those with minimal benefit packages.

Conclusions: NCMS provides some financial risk protection for individuals in rural China and has partly corrected distortions in Chinese rural healthcare (reducing the oversupply of specialty services and prescription drugs). However, the scheme may have also shifted uncompensated new responsibilities to village clinics. Given renewed interest among Chinese policy makers in strengthening primary care, the effect of NCMS deserves greater attention.