Give a Fish or Teach to Fish? Poverty Alleviation Effect of Government Support Policies and Self-Help Commercial Activities

This study explores the interactive effect of self-help efforts, specifically through household decisions to engage in commercialisation, and external supports provided via government antipoverty policies, on poverty reduction among poor households in northern Vietnam. With observational data from 1383 surveyed households, we use an estimation strategy combining inverse probability weighting, regression adjustment, and two-stage least squares to address selection bias and omitted variable bias in two variables of interest. We find that while these two interventions are individually effective in alleviating poverty, their combination is not necessarily as effective. Our results show that commercialisation only reduces poverty among non-supported households, while government supports are more effective among non-commercial households. This substitution of effects comes from the nature of support targeting and commercialisation. Households receiving supports often have lower capacity, making commercialisation ineffective or even impossible. Furthermore, current support policies are insufficient to enhance the impact of commercialisation. These results suggest that there could be more effective ways to combine external interventions and self-help efforts to better alleviate poverty.