社区方案和妇女的参与：中国的经验

WPS 26 2-.D POLICY RESEARCH WORKING PAPER 2622 Community Programs Effectively implemented gender-focused interventions and Women's Participation can have substantial social benefits when supported by The Chinese Experience the necessary legal and institutional framework, judging from this rural David Coady program in China. Xinyi Dai Limin Wang The World Bank East Asia and Pacific Region Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Sector Unit June 2001  POLICY RESEARCH WORKING PAPER 2622 Summary findings Using household data specifically collected for the nonparticipants. They find that the magnitude of the purpose of evaluation, Coady, Dai, and Wang program's impact depends sensitively on the program's empirically evaluate the impact on household income of ability to increase participation rates within villages. a rural program in China that focuses on increasing In the presence of the program, individual women's economic and social participation in the local participation helps to prevent negative externalities and community. They find that the program substantially to buy into the positive gains accruing to participants. increases women's participation and household income, The authors' results support the view that effectively and also generates positive social benefits. implemented gender-focused interventions can have The authors' results also suggest that the income gains substantial social benefits when supported by the accrue only to participants, and partly at the expense of necessary legal and institutional framework. This paper-a product of the Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Sector Unit, East Asia and Pacific Region- is part of a larger effort in the region to better understand the impact of gender-focused policies on development. Copies of the paper are available free from the World Bank, 1818 H Street NW, Washington, DC 20433. Please contact Limin Wang, room MC5-208, telephone 202-473-7596, fax 202-522-1735, email address lwangl@worldbank.org. Policy Research Working Papers are also posted on the Web at http://econ.worldbank.org. David Coady may be contacted at d.coady@cgiar.org. June 2001. (37 pages) The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the view of the World Bank, its Executive Directors, or the countries they represent. Produced by the Policy Research Dissemination Center  Community Programs and Women's Participation: The Chinese Experience David Coady,* Xinyi Dai,** and Limin Wang*** JEL Classification: 138, J15, J70, 01 Keywords: Gender bias, women's participation, social capital, public policy, China Acknowledgements: We would like to thank Jean Dreze, Athar Hussain, Jenny Lanjouw, Peter Lanjouw, Christopher Scott, Peter Sanfey, Jonathan Wadsworth and seminar participants in STICERD, London School of Economics and the International Food Policy Research Institute. The authors acknowledge research assistance from John Montgomery for compiling reference articles. * International Food Policy Research Institute, Washington D.C., U.S.A (email: d.coady(cgiar.org) ** Institute of Population Study, Fudan University, China *** The World Bank (email: Lwangl @worldbank.org)   Community Programs and Women's Participation: The Chinese Experience 1. Introduction Globally, over the last few decades, women's economic and social well-being has improved substantially. However, gender inequality is still widespread, and particularly so within developing countries. Empirical evidence from a number of countries establishes the fact that women still have substantial disadvantages over men, both within households and in economic and social life (Haddad, Hoddinott and Alderman, 1997; Dreze and Sen, 1995; Filmer, King and Pritchett, 1998). The persistence of female deprivation is generally attributed to a combination of social and cultural norms as well as being a result of various market failures. At the same time, a large body of empirical studies across many developing countries, in particular in Asia and Africa, consistently shows that improvements in women's education, health, employment opportunities and social participation, can generate substantial benefits. Investment in women not only benefits women themselves but also has relatively high social returns reflected in an improvement in their children's welfare and a reduction of fertility, poverty and gender bias (Summners, 1992; Subbarao et al, 1993; Quibria, 1993).' Therefore, gender-focused public policies are desirable not only from the perspective of social justice, but also because of the substantial social and economic benefits which result directly from enhancing women's social and economic status both within the household and in society as a whole. Also, the importance of market failures in determining outcomes suggests a potentially important role for public polices aimed at improving the welfare of women. Summers (1992, p1)argues that "an extensive body of recent research conducted at the World Bank and elsewhere has convinced me that once its benefits are recognized, investments in girls' education may well be the highest return investment available in the developing world".  There is substantial evidence supporting the conclusions that Chinese women have achieved higher levels of well-being compared to their counterparts in other developing countries. A comparison of a range of development indicators illustrates this point strikingly. Based on statistics from the World Development Indicators published by the World Bank, female life expectancy at birth in 19922 was 71 for China, 59 for India, 59 for Pakistan and 62 for Indonesia. Female literacy rates in the same year were 68% for China, 39% for India, 22% for Pakistan and 77% for Indonesia. In 1992, the birth rate per thousand in China was 19, while India's birth rate was as high as 29 and the average figure for poor countries excluding China and India was 37. It is widely believed that, to large extent, much of this achievement in improving women's welfare can be attributed to the implementation and enforcement of a wide range of gender-focused public policies over the past few decades (Das Gupta et al, 2001). All the above statistics illustrate China's success in empowering women and in combating deep-rooted feudal values, which would otherwise have largely excluded Chinese women both socially and economically. However, despite China's attractive record in this area, there exist surprisingly few empirical studies evaluating gender-focused public polices and programs. Recent work includes a case study by the All-China Woman's Federation (1993) and the World Bank study by Coletta and Sutton (1989), but none of these is based on rigorous empirical analysis of survey data. This may be due partly to the lack of attention paid inside China tc collecting quantitative survey data on this topic. Recently, however, several national surveys have been conducted in China focusing on assessing women's social and economic status. These include: (1) the 1991 Survey of Women's Status in Contemporary China, (2) the 1991 Survey of Female Science and Technology Employees, (3) the 1992 Survey of the Situation of Children, and (4) the 1993 Survey of Female 2 We chose 1992 so as to coincide with the implementation of the Chinese rural community program under evaluation in this paper. Detailed discussion of the project is presented in Section 2 below. 4  Cardres. Research based on these national surveys has been published within China (Tao and Jian, 1993; Wang, 1993; China Statistical Bureau, 1993; and Yie, 1997). These surveys provide a rich data source for analyzing and assessing Chinese women's social and economic status as well as for identifying key determinants of women's well-being. But these surveys are not specially designed for the purposes of program and policy evaluations. However, the 1996 household survey collected for the purpose of evaluating the so- called Population Control and Community Development Project, which has recently been made publicly available, is unique in this respect. The program, initiated by the Central Population Planning Committee3, was implemented in villages across 34 county towns in rural China in 1993. In 1996, three years after program implementation, a household survey was conducted for 57 villages, with 38 treatment villages and 19 control villages. Detailed socio-economic information on women and households was collected in the survey, and the questionnaire was specifically designed to collect information on women's economic and social participation within villages. The availability of such a survey provides us with an unique opportunity to formally evaluate the impact of gender-based public interventions in the Chinese context. To our knowledge, no rigorous program evaluation has been carried out using this data. Using this data, in this paper we attempt to evaluate the economic and social impact of the program on the rural communities. We address the following questions. First, can such a community program be transformed into human and social capital, which increases women's (or their family's) productivity, narrowly measured by their income-generating capacity? Second, does the program generate external benefits at the village level in the form of influencing the incomes of non- participants as well as participants? Thirdly, how important is the program's ability to increase the level of participation within villages for its ability to generate income impacts? Finally, are 5  there social benefits associated with such gender-focused programs, in particular, through impacts on children's welfare as well as on women's fertility decisions and gender preferences? The structure of the paper is as follows. In Section 2 we provide both an overview of gender-focused public policy in China and details of the nature of the community program being evaluated. In Section 3 we discuss the survey data used in our analysis and the methodology used to analyse this data. Section 4 presents the results from our empirical analysis. Section 5 concludes. 2. Gender-Focused Public Policy and the Community Program In this section we first provide an overview of gender-focused public policy in China and its role in improving the well-being of Chinese women. We then describe the specific community program to be analysed in this paper. 2.1 Gender-Focused Public Policy in China As pointed out above, Chinese women have experienced a significant improvement in their well-being compared with women in many other low-income countries. This suggests that important policy insights may be gleaned from improving our understanding of the underlying factors that have contributed to higher women's welfare in China, a country ranked among the poorest countries in the world in the 1990s. To this end, a brief overview of China's history of gender-focused public polices is thus helpful. The Chinese government has played an active role in implementing and enforcing gender-based public policies in key areas since as early as the 1950s. Specific public polices were designed particularly to: (I) improve women's education, health care, and employment 3One of the key organisations in the central government responsible for formulating population policies and their implementation nationwide. 6  opportunities, (2) promote women's social and political involvement at all levels of administration, and (3) establish a legal and institutional framework to protect woman's property rights and to promote equality in employment opportunities, access to basic services, and participation in political life. In principle at least, the implementation of public policies designed to promote women's well-being has been made mandatory nation wide with particular attention paid to rural and poor areas where women's deprivation was deeper and more widespread (Tao and Jian, 1997).4 One of the most significant achievements in of China since 1949 has been the widespread public provision of basic services in education and health care and its focus on equal access. Based on figures published by the Research Institute of All China Women's Federation (1991) between the early 1950s to late 1980s, the number of health clinics (focusing particularly on providing primary health care for women and children) increased from 349 to 2,793 in urban areas, and from 2,880 to 11,795 in rural areas. This clearly has contributed to the improvement of health outcomes for women and children. For example, female life expectancy at birth has increased from 35 years in the early 1960s to 71 in the early 1990s (The World Bank, 2000). The focus on investment in social infrastructure included setting up evening schools and the provision of literacy classes in local communities, and this has undoubtedly been one of the major factors explaining the rapid reduction of adult (particularly female) illiteracy rates. Chinese official statistics show that the female illiteracy rate fell from 64% in 1970 to 24% in 1998 (Research Institute of All China Women's Federation, 1998). This overview of public policy in China reveals not only its gender focus but also the recognition of the complementarity between different sets of policies. It has been recognised that women's status can only be improved when a supporting legal and institutional framework is 4 One expects, however, that the vigour with which these policies are implemented varies depending, for example, on the nature of the policy, on the region, and on the commitment of local leaders to the particular policy. 7  well established, an area where govemment intervention is particularly crucial. To this end, the land reforms in 1950 endorsed the equal entitlement of land between men and women. The marriage law, introduced in 1957 and further modified in 1985, was geared towards the protection of women's welfare both within and outside the family. In addition, various programs were implemented aimed at raising the awareness of women's legal rights and providing women with legal information and advice services (Wu and Cheng, 1997). School attendance both for boys and girls was made mandatory as early as the 1970s. This has had a profound impact on increasing female school enrolment and reducing intra-household gender bias, as reflected in the fact that female enrolment rates in primary and middle schools increased from 33% to 45% and 25% to 40%, respectively, between 1950 and the early 1990s. The Chinese government has also emphasized women's participation in political life. According to statistics published by the Research Institute of All China Women's Federation (1998), the proportion of female parliament members was around 12% in the 1950s and rose to over 21% in the 1990s. Female political party membership has been as high as around 40% of total membership since the 1970s, and women accounted for over one third of political carders.5 Another indicator, t".e proportion of female staff engaged in scientific research, which reflects both female educational achievement and gender equality, shows that women have accounted for over one third of the staff in this profession since the 1970s. Clearly, China's success in improving women's status is undoubtedly associated with its long history of implementing gender-focused public polices and programs. Thus, there are likely to be important policy lessons to be learnt from the Chinese experience. Empirical research, in particular focusing on evaluating public programs, is extremely valuable in this regard. Unfortunately, empirical research in this area has been sparse, partly due to data limitations. However, even when data sources were available, the studies carried out (e.g. Peng and Dai, 5 A cadre is a high-ranking political appointee. 8  1996 and Lin, 1997) tended to focus more on qualitative case studies with little attention paid to quantitatively evaluating the impact of existing public programs. In this paper, we aim to fill this gap. Using the 1996 household survey, we attempt to evaluate the economic and social impact of a specific gender -focused public program. 2.2 The Community Program The Population Control and Community Development Project is a gender-focused community program. The key objectives of the program are: (i) to help women identify a range of potential economic and social opportunities, and (ii) to facilitate the development of public and community institutions to enable women to exploit these opportunities. In a sense, the program is an example of what Uphoff (1992, p273) refers to as a "top-down" intervention aimed at introducing, sustaining and institutionalizing "bottom-up" development. This project was designed primarily to evaluate the impact on women's fertility decisions of public interventions aimed at enhancing women's economic and social opportunities. It is being recognised more widely in China, both among policy practitioners and within the research community focusing on assessing population policies, that family planning polices can be more effectively implemented and enforced through providing women with more social and economic opportunities than by simply deploying coercive measures aimed at controlling population growth. Leading sociologists and demographers in China have also become more aware of the potential impact of community development programs on social norms, e.g. regarding gender preference and desired family size (e.g. Peng and Dai, 1996). As a result, a team of population experts (including both policy practitioners from the Central Population Bureau and scholars from the Population Research Institute at Fudan University) initiated, designed and implemented this community program. The program was implemented in 9  1993 in over 37 xian6 across 17 provinces (out of 28) in China. In all, 57 relatively poor villages across rural areas were chosen to evaluate the program, with 38 villages chosen as treatment villages where the program was implemented and the other 19 villages used as a control group (i.e. without intervention).' The data collected relate to the year 1996, three years after program implementation. Several qualitative case studies in a few villages have been carried out to assess the impact of this program (Dai and Peng, 1996; Lin, 1997) and the findings suggest a positive program impact in terms of reducing preferred family size, reducing gender bias, and increasing women's participation in community life. The community program has both economic and social dimensions. The program involved agricultural seminars and extension services, organised cultural and entertainment activities (e.g. dancing groups, chess clubs and reading groups), and political meetings. One of the special features of this project is its emphasis on the development of human and social capital rather than providing financial aid. Therefore, direct financial support from central or local government is very limited. Village leaders in the treatment group were given seminars on the importance of community development, women's participation and their impact on women's fertility attitudes. Women were given priority access to agricultural extension services initiated and supported by local government, including information on new farming technology, and training and technical assistance. Agricultural technicians were invited to give advice on farming techniques mostly suitable for local conditions and on various productive activities to which woman are better suited. Based on the principle of self-sufficiency and self-development, financial resources for setting up village libraries, reading rooms or social and entertainment facilities come mainly from the taxation of village enterprises and/or reallocation of village general funds. 6A xian is a collection of neighbouring villages. 7Program organisers claimed that the choice of villages participating in the program was made randomly, but we also test this in our analysis. 10  The experience of Luochun, one of the treatment villages, provides a specific example of the program (Dai and Peng, 1996). In 1993, Luochun had annual per capita income around 500 yuan ($75) and an average number of children per woman of 3.5. It had been traditionally underdeveloped and backward in many respects. Community social activities were particularly lacking and most women were confined to domestic life. Through the community development project, employment opportunities for women in areas such as apple processing, tobacco processing, and marketing of the local traditional handicrafts (e.g. embroidery) have been identified as effective ways of promoting women's economic participation. Also, as a result of the program, a reading room and an entertainment hall were built to improve women's social involvement in community life. An important feature of the program is its emphasis on enhancing women's social as well as economic participation in the community. Improving women's access to income generating opportunities is obviously expected to result in higher incomes. However, a more recent body of literature also draws attention to the notion of social capital and its links with social participation. The concept of social capital, according to Putnam (I993), refers to features of social organisation and participation, such as trust, norms and networks.8 Social capital formed through individual participation in social life, it is argued, shares the same features as physical and human capital which are productive in terms of income-generating activities. In addition, social capital has externalities in the sense that higher levels of social capital in local communities can benefit participants and non-participants alike.9 According to Woolcock and 8 See Woolcock and Narayan (2000) for a useful review of the literature from the perspective of economic development, including Narayan and Pritchett (1997), Knack (1997), Knack and Keefer (1995), Grootaert (1999), and Maluccio, Haddad and May (2000). See Coleman (1988) and Fukuyama (1995) for details of the extensive discussion of social capital in the sociology literature. 9 There are many forms of social capital; here we are more concerned with the more inclusive community- level social capital than with the exclusive social connections considered by, for example, Olson (1982), Borjas (1994), Migdal (1987) and Case and Katz (1991). 11  Narayan (2000, p226), empirical evidence suggests a wide range of benefits from the accumulation of social capital: Those communities endowed with a diverse stock of social networks and civic associations are in a stronger position to confront poverty and vulnerability (Moser, 1996; Narayan, 1995), resolve disputes (Schafft, 1998; Varshney, 2000), and take advantage of new opportunities (Isham, 1999).A defining feature of being poor, moreover, is that one is not a member of - or may even be actively excluded from - certain social networks and institutions that could be used to secure jobs and decent housing (Wilson, 1987, 1996)." The authors thus also recognize (p231) that "imputing only desirable outcomes to social capital, or equating them with it, ignores the possibility that these outcomes may be attained at another group's expense". The literature on social capital suggests that there are a number of ways through which social participation can be income enhancing. Firstly, voluntary co-operation is more likely to occur in a community where the stock of social capital is abundant leading to superior economic outcomes in compariscn to those from non-cooperative behaviour. In particular, social capital can enhance greater co-operation and collective action in the provision of local public goods. Secondly, social capital reduces the cost of information, thus lowering transaction costs, increasing the volume of mutually beneficial trading, and facilitating the diffusion of modern technology. Thirdly, greater social capital can to some extent compensate for information imperfections that could form barriers to many economic activities taking place. For example, many economically beneficial investments may not take place if credit or insurance markets function badly due to imperfect information. Fourthly, social capital can compensate for the absence of formal legal and political institutions by encouraging economic activities in the absence of enforceable contracts, supporting the socially efficient management of natural resources, and promoting responsible citizenship. The concept of social capital is broadened and enriched when it is discussed in the context of women's empowerment. If the formation of social capital is through women's 12  participation in society, then the evidence identified earlier suggests that substantial economic and social benefits can be generated. In this paper, we aim to empirically test this widely held view in the context of the Chinese experience. 3. Data and Methodology In this section we present a brief discussion of the data used in the analysis. This is then followed by an explanation of the methodology used to evaluate the social and economic impact of the program. 3.1 Data Although the survey and the community program were primarily designed to assess the impact of a woman's participation in community life on her fertility preferences, the information available from the survey is sufficiently extensive to allow us to address a somewhat broader set of issues related to women's economic and social participation. The survey collected detailed information in three areas: (1) household socio-economic data; (2) women's community participation activities; and (3) women's attitudes to gender and fertility issues. This information was collected for both control and treatment households in 1996; the absence of baseline data for 1993 obviously restricts the nature of our analysis (e.g. we are unable to control for unobserved individual fixed effects). Table l a provides a statistical summary of the survey data for both sets of villages and Table lb describes some of the variables in more detail and how they enter into our regression analysis. A central objective of our analysis is to determine if the program has some features of capital (i.e. both economic and social), which increase income. To the extent that the control and treatment localities were randomly selected, a simple comparison of mean income across both groups can provide an unbiased estimate of the program impact on income. However, from 13  Table la we can see that many variables, which one would assume to be exogenous (i.e. not influenced by the program, at least within a three-year period) do in fact differ. For example, the mean levels of education, land size, age and number of laborers differ across the control and treatment villages. Also, the control households are disproportionately concentrated in the Northern region while the treatment households are disproportionately concentrated in the South- West region. These differences cause concerns regarding the randomness of program assignment to communities in practice. Below we discuss the methodology employed in the paper to evaluate the impact of the program and to deal with potential problems arising from endogenous program placement and/or self-selection issues relevant to program evaluation.10 3.2 Methodology In line with the above discussion of the data and the implications for estimating program impact, we first compare mean income levels in control and treatment areas based on household- level data. To control for observed heterogeneity across households, we then estimate the program impact on income using multivariate ordinary least squares (OLS) regression techniques based on the following equation: log yi =x + 3 X j+ 6 Vpdi + ui where y, is annual household income and Xi includes socio-economic variables such as the age and education of both husband and wife, number of labourers, land size, and location (i.e. regional) dummies. The error terms ui's are assumed to follow independently identical distributions. The variable Vpd is a dummy capturing (village) program participation - that is, takes the value unity for households in "treatment" villages and zero for those in "control" villages. However, Vpd cannot be treated as exogenous if, for example, the choice of program '