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The impact of credit policy on rice production in Myanmar

PLEASE NOTE: THE VENUE FOR THIS EVENT HAS CHANGED.
PLEASE NOTE: THE TIME FOR THIS EVENT HAS CHANGED.
Crawford School of Public Policy | Arndt-Corden Department of Economics
Sorting rice in Sittwe

Event details

ACDE Seminar

Date & time

Tuesday 26 June 2018
2.30pm–4.00pm

Venue

Coombs ext 1.04, Building 8, Fellows Road, ANU

Speaker

Hoa Thi Minh Nguyen, Crawford School of Public Policy, ANU.

Contacts

Ross McLeod, Seminar Convener

In this seminar, Crawford School’s Hoa Nguyen explores the impact of the subsidised rice credit programme in Myanmar.

Rural finance has long been an important tool for poverty reduction and rural development by donors and governments, but the impacts have been controversial. Measuring impact is challenging due to identification problems caused by selection bias and governments’ targeted interventions, while randomised trial data is scarce and limited to contexts where little to no rural finance exists. Using an author-collected data set, we provide insights on a large-scale, long-lasting subsidised rice credit programme in Myanmar. Myanmar is one of the poorest and, until recently, most economically isolated countries in Asia. Identification relies on a fuzzy regression discontinuity design, exploiting an arbitrary element to the credit provision rule which is based on rice land holding size. Although we find little evidence that rice yield or output is increased, we do see that the program has some positive effects on total household income, suggesting a positive spillover effect on other farm income activities.

Hoa Nguyen is a Research Fellow at the Crawford School of Public Policy. She is interested in analysing economic policies in health and food security, and issues related to climate change, inequality and poverty. Hoa received her PhD from ANU in 2013. Before joining the Crawford School, she was a researcher at the Centre for Analysis and Forecasting, Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences.

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