Targeting the Poor: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Indonesia

By Vivi Alatas, Abhijit Banerjee, Rema Hanna, Benjamin A. Olken, Julia Tobias. The American Economic Review, 2012

648 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Political Science and International Relations

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/64db79e4f4be34e73d8d6c770e50d2b1501bc02d

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Citations in the corpus

Political Economy of Public Policies: Insights from Distortions to Agricultural and Food Markets (2013, positive): “However, this argument has weakened as developing countries have learned to introduce and apply valueadded taxes more efficiently (Tanzi and Zee 2000; Besley and Persson 2013) and as new information technologies have greatly lowered the cost of providing conditional cash transfers to targeted groups”
A poor means test? Econometric targeting in Africa (2016, neutral): “(2016) and on community-based targeting see Alatas et al. (2012), Karlan and Thuysbaert (2013) and Stoeffler et al. (2016). Barrientos (2013) provides a useful overview of the whole class of social assistance policies in developing countries.”
Factorial Designs, Model Selection, and (Incorrect) Inference in Randomized Experiments (2019, methodology): “Figure B.5 taken from Alatas et al. (2012) has details of the experimental design.”
The Heterogeneous Impact of Conditional Cash Transfers (2013, background): “Collectively, the results highlight the importance of carefully choosing proxy indicators to identify and target the poor (Coady et al., 2004; Alatas et al., 2012; and De Wachter and Galiani, 2006).”
The Economist as Plumber (2017, positive): “Banerjee et al. (2012b) find that the promise of a transfer out of a punishment posting induced police officers to work harder on conducting random sobriety checkpoints.”
Reshaping Institutions: Evidence on Aid Impacts Using a Pre-Analysis Plan (2012, background): “Malchow-Møller, and Andersen (2011), Alatas et al. (2012), Finkelstein et al.”
Citizens and Service Delivery: Assessing the Use of Social Accountability Approaches in Human Development Sectors (2011, background): “Alatas et al. 2011 Das and Hammer 2007 Muralidharan and Sundararaman 2010 Fiszbein, Ringold, and Rogers 2011 Design versus substance Build implementation features into the evaluation design.”
Network Structure and the Aggregation of Information: Theory and Evidence from Indonesia (2016, positive): “This study stems from a broader data collection effort that was designed to study the efficacy of different targeting methodologies in Indonesia (Alatas et al. 2012).”
Universal Basic Income in the Developing World (2019, neutral): “See for example Alatas et al. (2012). (18)In this approach, participating in the program involves bearing some cost that makes participation relatively attractive to the poor.”
The Impact of Fiscal and Political Decentralization on Local Public Investments in Indonesia (2017, background): “…2002 for Albania and Galasso and Ravallion 2005 for the Food-for-Education Program in Bangladesh), or, at least, to be able to achieve higher local satisfaction (Alatas et al. 2012).1 However, there is also a growing body of evidence on deficiencies of accountability in decentralized settings.”
Transparency, Reproducibility, and the Credibility of Economics Research (2018, positive): “…employed pre-analysis plans include poverty targeting programs in Indonesia, an evaluation of the Toms shoe company donation program, and a job training program in Turkey, among many others (Olken, Onishi, and Wong 2012; Alatas et al. 2012; Wydick, Katz, and Janet 2014; Hirshleifer et al. 2015).”
Debunking the Stereotype of the Lazy Welfare Recipient (2015, neutral): “Unlike developed countries, where program eligibility can be verified from tax returns or employment records, developing country labor markets often lack formal records on income and employment, and thus alternative targeting methods must be used (see Alatas et al. 2012, for a description).”
Does Elite Capture Matter? Local Elites and Targeted Welfare Programs in Indonesia (2019, methodology): “…and negotiations that happen at the district and sub-district level, some villages receive an “over-quota” of slots relative to the actual 21 Appendix Table 8 provides this analysis for the low-stakes experiment in Alatas et al (2012a).”