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. 2012 Jun;102(4):1206-1240.
doi: 10.1257/aer.102.4.1206.

Targeting the Poor: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Indonesia

Vivi Alatas  1 , Abhijit Banerjee  2 , Rema Hanna  3 , Benjamin A Olken  4 , Julia Tobias  5
Affiliations

Targeting the Poor: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Indonesia

Vivi Alatas et al. Am Econ Rev. 2012 Jun.

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.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
PDF of log per-capita consumption of beneficiaries and non-beneficiaries, by treatment status
Figure 2
Figure 2
Simulated poverty impacts for different transfer sizes and poverty lines
Figure 3
Figure 3
Effect of order in ranking meeting on mis-target rate
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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