American Economic Review Vol. 102 No. 4 2012

Targeting the Poor: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Indonesia

Vivi Alatas¹; Abhijit Banerjee²; Rema Hanna³; Benjamin A. Olken⁴; Julia Tobias⁵

¹ World Bank, Jakarta Stock Exchange Building, Tower 2, 12th and 13th Floor, Jakarta, Indonesia. · ² Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 50 Memorial Drive, Building E52, Room 252A, Cambridge, MA 02142. · ³ JFK School of Government, Mailbox 26, 79 JFK Street, Cambridge, MA 02138. · ⁴ Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 50 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA 02142. · ⁵ Stanford University, Dept. of Political Science, 616 Serra Street, Stanford, CA 94305.

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.

DOI

10.1257/aer.102.4.1206

Volume

102

Issue

4

Pages

1206-1240

Language

en

Sources

openalex bibtex:phds-export.bib crossref

Cite

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