Targeting the Poor: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Indonesia
Vivi Alatas, Abhijit Banerjee, Rema Hanna, Benjamin A. Olken, Julia Tobias
American Economic Review · 2012 · Volume 102 · Issue 4
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. (JEL C93, I32, I38, O12, O15, O18, R23)
Keywords
Field Experiments, Measurement and Analysis of Poverty, Welfare and Poverty: Government Programs, Provision and Effects of Welfare Programs, Microeconomic Analyses of Economic Development, Economic Development: Human Resources, Human Development, Income Distribution, Migration, Economic Development: Urban, Rural, Regional, and Transportation Analysis, Housing, Infrastructure, Urban, and Transportation Economics: Regional Migration, Regional Labor Markets, Population, Neighborhood Characteristics
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