China managed to eliminate all extreme poverty in rural areas in 2020. Poor households, however, may risk falling back into poverty due to the COVID‐19. This paper examines the impacts of the pandemic on wages and household incomes among different groups in poor areas of rural China. Using a unique dataset from five poverty‐stricken counties, we found that the pandemic has had large negative effects on wage income for migrant workers and workers in manufacturing, the private sector, and small enterprises. Compared with households relying on wage income, households relying on small businesses have suffered much more from the pandemic, whereas households depending on farming or transfer payments have been less affected. Although poor and ethnic minority households lost significant amounts of wage income due to the pandemic, they did not lose more household income than nonpoor and nonminority households. We conclude that support from the government has kept vulnerable households from suffering more than other households from the effects of COVID‐19. Our findings suggest that the government can play a strong role in alleviating the negative impacts of the COVID‐19.

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This study reviews peer reviewed journal articles on microfinance impacts, sustainability, and outreach over the period 1997 to 2011. The review suggests mixed results on the impacts of microfinance worldwide, and fails to discover a concrete relationship between outreach and sustainability. However, the review confirms microfinance institutions extend financial and nonfinancial services to the bottom of the pyramid ignored by traditional financial institutions and considered un-bankable. The paper contributes to extant microfinance literature and guides inexperienced microfinance practitioners toward further academic research and publishing their work in relevant journals.