Targeting the Poor: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Indonesia
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TargetingthePoor.pdf
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881.34 KB
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Author(s)
Alatas, Vivi
Banerjee, Abhijit
Date Issued
June 2012
Journal
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
Abstract
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.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Economics
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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.
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.102.4.1206
