Journal Article

Targeting the Poor: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Indonesia

Hanna, Rema, Olken, Benjamin A., Tobias, Julia, Alatas, Vivi, Banerjee, Abhijit

2012

Overview

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.

• Publisher: American Economic Association
• Subject: Communities / Community / Community satisfaction / Consumer economics / Consumption / Consumption per capita / Consumption theory / Developing countries / Diplomatic & consular services / Economic inequality / Economic systems / Economic theory / Error rates / Experiments / Field work / Group facilitation / Household consumption / Households / Indonesia / Informal economy / LDCs / Low income groups / Means testing / Methods / Per capita / Poor / Poverty / Poverty alleviation / Poverty line / Predetermined motion time systems / Rural communities / Satisfaction / Social policy / Socioeconomic factors / Studies / Villages