Targeting the Poor: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Indonesia
55 Pages Posted: 17 May 2010 Last revised: 2 Mar 2022
Date Written: May 2010
Abstract
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.
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you want regular updates from SSRN on Twitter?
Paper statistics
Recommended Papers
-
Micro-Level Estimation of Welfare
By Peter F. Lanjouw, Jean O. Lanjouw, ...
-
Combining Census and Survey Data to Study Spatial Dimensions of Poverty a Case Study of Ecuador
By Peter F. Lanjouw and Jesko Hentschel
-
Crime and Local Inequality in South Africa
By Gabriel Demombynes and Berk Ozler
-
Picking the Poor: Indicators for Geographic Targeting in Peru
-
Picking the Poor: Indicators for Geographic Targeting in Peru
-
Poverty Comparisons with Noncompatible Data: Theory and Illustrations
By Jean O. Lanjouw and Peter F. Lanjouw
-
On the Unequal Inequality of Poor Communities
By Chris Elbers, Peter F. Lanjouw, ...
-
Poverty Alleviation Through Geographic Targeting: How Much Does Disaggregation Help?
By Chris Elbers, Tomoki Fujii, ...
-
On the Targeting and Redistributive Efficiencies of Alternative Transfer Instruments
By David P. Coady and Emmanuel Skoufias
-
Do School Facilities Matter? The Case of the Peruvian Social Fund (Foncodes)