Designing Anti-Poverty Programs in Emerging Economies in the 21st Century: Lessons from Indonesia for the World

Abstract

Governments of developing countries around the world have dramatically expanded social protection programs for the poor in recent decades. In doing so, they face a host of challenges in the targeting, design and implementation of these programs. In this paper, I describe the results from more than a decade of collaboration with the Indonesian government to understand how best to tackle these challenges, drawing primarily on evidence from randomised controlled trials. I highlight results that show the advantages of both community-based targeting and self-targeting, the importance of tangible information about beneficiaries’ rights in minimising leakage, and the remarkable impacts of conditional cash transfers in the medium term. I also describe several recent studies that use randomisation at scale to generate policy-relevant evidence.