Finding the Poor vs. Measuring their Poverty : Exploring the Drivers of Targeting Effectiveness in Indonesia
Centralized targeting registries are increasingly used to allocate social assistance benefits in developing countries. There are two key design issues that matter for targeting accuracy: (i) which households to survey for inclusion in the registry...
| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2018
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/731751519134047409/Finding-the-poor-vs-measuring-their-poverty-exploring-the-drivers-of-targeting-effectiveness-in-Indonesia http://hdl.handle.net/10986/29402 |
| Summary: | Centralized targeting registries are
increasingly used to allocate social assistance benefits in
developing countries. There are two key design issues that
matter for targeting accuracy: (i) which households to
survey for inclusion in the registry and (ii) how to rank
surveyed households. The authors attempt to identify their
relative importance by evaluating Indonesia's Unified
Database for Social Protection Programs (UDB), among the
largest targeting registries in the world, used to provide
social assistance to over 25 million households. Linking
administrative data with an independent household survey,
they find that the UDB system is more progressive than
previous, program-specific targeting approaches. However,
simulating an alternative targeting system based on
enumerating all households, they find a one-third reduction
in undercoverage of the poor compared to focusing on
households registered in the UDB. Overall, there are large
gains in targeting performance from improving the initial
registration stage relative to the ranking stage. |
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