TY  - BOOK
AU  - Alatas,Vivi
AU  - Banerjee,Abhijit
AU  - Hanna,Rema
AU  - Olken,Benjamin A.
AU  - Tobias,Julia
ED  - National Bureau of Economic Research.
TI  - Targeting the Poor: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Indonesia 
T2  - NBER working paper series
PY  - 2010///
CY  - Cambridge, Mass.
PB  - National Bureau of Economic Research
N1  - May 2010; Hardcopy version available to institutional subscribers
N2  - 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
UR  - https://www.nber.org/papers/w15980
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.3386/w15980
ER  -