We re-visit the site of a large, World Bank-financed, rural
development program in China, 10 years after it began and four years after
disbursements ended. The program emphasized community participation in multisectoral
interventions (agriculture, non-farm enterprises, infrastructure, social
services) financed by grants and loans. Data were collected on 2,000 households,
in both project and non-project areas, who had first been surveyed at project
commencement. We estimate the incremental impact of the program, on top of
pre-exiting governmental programs. A double-difference estimator reveals that
the (sizeable) short-term gains in average incomes were mostly saved. Modest
consumption gains only emerged over time, but were larger for the poor, notably
when better educated. The main results are robust to corrections for various
sources of time-varying selection bias, including spillover effects generated by the
local political economy.