Across a few prohibitive miles: The impact of the Anti-Poverty Relocation Program in China

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.