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Despite its rapid economic growth, China remains a developing country facing serious challenges of poverty and inequality. This article examines the development and effectiveness of China's primary anti-poverty family policy, the Minimum Living Standard Assurance ( MLSA, or Dibao). Using rich administrative data and building on the existing literature, this article provides a critical evaluation of MLSA's benefit generosity, coverage, targeting, and anti-poverty effectiveness. To help reinforce MLSA's anti-poverty impacts, local governments in recent years have implemented a series of supplementary policies and programs, including health, education, housing, and work support programs. This article also provides an assessment of these supplementary policies and programs and draws policy implications for the ongoing expansion of the Chinese government's anti-poverty efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The accountability movement in public policy hails a new programme for US foreign assistance - the Millennium Challenge Account established in 2004 with the aim of 'picking winners' for grants among developing countries based on their demonstrated quality of governance. This article uses the MCA's own rating system to dispute its claim to know in advance which countries are best positioned to meet major development goals. High governance scores alone bear little or no relationship to growth in national income or decline in poverty. Attempting to measure public-policy performance limits the range of choice available to policy-makers, and may inadvertently limit true performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article has two goals: (i) to reduce the 7-fold productivity differential required to explain the observed 33-fold income difference between the richest and poorest countries of the world; and (ii) to explain cross-country differences in the capital-output ratio. To achieve the first goal we modify the production function of the standard neoclassical growth model to include public capital whose provision is subject to intermediation costs. For the second goal we distort private investment by introducing credit frictions. The model, quantified using cross-country data, generates an income gap of 33 with productivity differences of only 3 under the measured variations in public and private capital. The required productivity gap declines even further, to 2.1, when we introduce a home-production sector. On the second goal, however, credit frictions do a poor job of explaining cross-country variations in the capital-output ratio. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]