Targeting the Poor: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Indonesia
Author(s)
Alatas, Vivi; Banerjee, Abhijit
DownloadNote: AEA allows librarian-downloaded final published version (881.3Kb)
PUBLISHER_POLICY
Publisher Policy
Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
Terms of use
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
This paper reports an experiment in 640 Indonesian villages on three approaches to target the poor: proxy means tests (PMT), where assets are used to predict consumption; community targeting, where villagers rank everyone from richest to poorest; and a hybrid. Defining poverty based on PPP$2 per capita consumption, community targeting and the hybrid perform somewhat worse in identifying the poor than PMT, though not by enough to significantly affect poverty outcomes for a typical program. Elite capture does not explain these results. Instead, communities appear to apply a different concept of poverty. Consistent with this finding, community targeting results in higher satisfaction.
Date issued
2012-06Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of EconomicsJournal
American Economic Review
Publisher
American Economic Association
Citation
Alatas, Vivi et al. “Targeting the Poor: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Indonesia.” American Economic Review 102.4 (2012): 1206–1240.
Version: Final published version
ISSN
0002-8282
1944-7981