ABSTRACT
This chapter explores why East and South Asia have been so much more successful in alleviating poverty than Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and to what extent this performance can be ascribed to different initial conditions and radically different rural development strategies. It reviews the various evaluation procedures and methodologies available to estimate the net impact on poverty incidence of alternative development strategies and of policy measures and institutions while controlling for different initial conditions. Perhaps the most well-known examples are the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development research program on adjustment and equity and the work of the Cornell team on the effects of adjustment on poverty in SSA. The Asian model of poverty alleviation offers useful lessons for the developing world, particularly SSA. In a methodological note on impact evaluation, K. Ezemenari, Anders Rudqvist, and Kalamdhi Subbarao concluded that the organizing principle of a good impact evaluation is identification of the counterfactual.
