title: Targeting the Poor: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Indonesia.
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.
authors.affiliation: World Bank, Jakarta Stock Exchange Building, Tower 2, 12th and 13th Floor, Jakarta, Indonesia, valatas@worldbank.org.
authors.forename: Vivi
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Alatas
authors.affiliation: MIT Dept. of Economics, 50 Memorial Drive, Building E52, Room 252A, Cambridge, MA 02142, banerjee@mit.edu.
authors.forename: Abhijit
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Banerjee
authors.affiliation: JFK School of Government, Mailbox 26, 79 JFK Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, Rema_Hanna@ksg.harvard.edu.
authors.forename: Rema
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Hanna
authors.affiliation: MIT Dept. of Economics, bolken@mit.edu.
authors.forename: Benjamin A
authors.initials: BA
authors.lastname: Olken
authors.affiliation: Stanford University, Dept. of Political Science, 616 Serra Street, Stanford, CA 94305.
authors.forename: Julia
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Tobias