Assessment of Project Sustainability for Poverty Reduction in Rural China Based on Different Models

Project sustainability is one of the important aspects of project management. The sustainability of anti-poverty projects will undoubtedly exert great influences on the long-term benefit of the projects for sustained poverty reduction. By adopting ANOVA analysis and post hoc tests based on field questionnaire data using the SPSS software, this paper makes an empirical assessment of the differences between different poverty reduction models in rural China, in an attempt to identify the differences of the sustainability of anti-poverty projects between four major poverty reduction models, i.e. sister-region support, relocation of farmers, the whole village approach and utilizing foreign capital. Major findings include: (1) the degrees of sustainability of projects differ dramatically between different anti-poverty models; (2) different models are significantly different in post-management agency and staff, post-management rules and regulations, post-management funds, sources of farmers' income, development ideology and overall project sustainability; (3) projects under the models of utilizing foreign capital and the whole village approach have better performances in most aspects of this project sustainability assessment. Policy implications are proposed accordingly based on these findings.