Targeting the Poor: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Indonesia / Vivi Alatas, Abhijit Banerjee, Rema Hanna, Benjamin A. Olken, Julia Tobias.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Alatas, Vivi.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Banerjee, Abhijit.

Hanna, Rema.

Olken, Benjamin A.

Tobias, Julia.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w15980.

NBER working paper series no. w15980

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Other Title:

Targeting the Poor

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2010.

Summary:

In developing countries, identifying the poor for redistribution or social insurance is challenging because the government lacks information about people's incomes. This paper reports the results of a field experiment conducted in 640 Indonesian villages that investigated two main approaches to solving this problem: proxy-means tests, where a census of hard-to-hide assets is used to predict consumption, and community-based targeting, where villagers rank everyone on a scale from richest to poorest. When poverty is defined using per-capita expenditure and the common PPP$2 per day threshold, we find that community-based targeting performs worse in identifying the poor than proxy-means tests, particularly near the threshold. This worse performance does not appear to be due to elite capture. Instead, communities appear to be using a different concept of poverty: the results of community-based methods are more correlated with how individual community members rank each other and with villagers' self-assessments of their own status than per-capita expenditure. Consistent with this, the community-based methods result in higher satisfaction with beneficiary lists and the targeting process.

Notes:

Print version record

May 2010.