How Relevant Is Targeting to the Success of an Antipoverty Program?

By M. Ravallion. 2007

131 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Policy-oriented discussions often assume that “better targeting” implies larger impacts on poverty or more cost-effective interventions for fighting poverty. The literature on the economics of targeting warns against that assumption, but evidence has been scarce and the lessons from the literature have often been ignored by practitioners. This paper shows that standard measures of targeting performance are uninformative or even deceptive about the impacts on poverty, and cost-effectiveness in reducing poverty, of a large cash transfer program in China. The results suggest that in program design and evaluation, it would be better to focus directly on the program’s outcomes for poor people than to rely on prevailing measures of targeting. JEL codes: I32, I38, O15 Like many developing countries, China is trying to develop an effective system of social protection based on cash transfers targeted to the poor. The largest such program that China has attempted—and almost certainly the largest such program in the developing world—is the “Minimum Livelihood Guarantee Scheme,” popularly known as Di Bao. This has been the government’s main response to the new challenges of social protection in urban areas. While economic reforms and structural changes in the Chinese economy have meant high rates of economic growth, it is believed that certain sub-groups have been adversely affected or have been unable to participate in the new economic opportunities due to long-term illness, disability, or their lack of skills. The collapse of the old safety net provided by guaranteed employment has clearly left some households vulnerable. Some of the “left behind” households started poor and some became poor, even though aggregate poverty rates have tended to fall over time. Urban areas have figured prominently in these concerns about the “new poor.”

Subfields: Nutrition and Dietetics, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b0a40e5ba578ecc4308ee09351ea63471810c4e8

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In Nutrition and Dietetics

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Citations in the corpus

A Comparative Perspective on Poverty Reduction in Brazil, China, and India (2009, background): “See Ravallion (2009b) in the context of an antipoverty program in China, though the points made are reasonably generic.”
The targeting effectiveness of social transfers (2017, background): “…assistance 10.1 Proxy 5: Percentage of richest 80 per cent receiving assistance 11.9 Proxy 6: Percentage of richest 90 per cent receiving assistance Ravallion (2007) Minimum Livelihood Guarantee Scheme, known as Di Bao (DB) Poor urban households (means tested income below a specified poverty…”
Evaluating the Impact of Brazil's Bolsa Família: Cash Transfer Programs in Comparative Perspective (2010, unknown): “As Ravallion (2007) has shown, most targeting measures are not correlated with poverty impact because they do not ac count for program coverage.”
Affirmative Action in Education: Evidence From Engineering College Admissions in India. NBER Working Paper No. 13926. (2008, unknown): “In the remaining panels of Appendix Table A1, we compare basic characteristics (as available in the entrance exam data) between located and non- 9 See, for example, Ravallion (2009), for a general description of the rationale and debate on the use of proxies for income in targeting the poor.”