Working Paper 194 - The Impact of Community Development Works Programs (CWP) on Households’ Wellbeing in Albania

This paper attempts to evaluate the impact of the Albanian Development Fund’s (ADF’s) CWP programs on access to infrastructures, welfare and social capital. We use the standard of Heckman and Vytlacil (2001) marginal treatment effects (MTE) approach as recently formalized by of Björklund and Moffitt (2007) to account for both heterogeneity and selection bias. Results show that the beneficial impact of ADF projects and programs is straightforward as the treated communities and households enjoy better infrastructures, higher standards of living as well as a better social cohesion in the community. The approach used here could be adapted to evaluate the impact of projects and programmes of governments and institutions such as the African Development Bank in Africa.