TY - JOUR AU - Alatas,Vivi AU - Banerjee,Abhijit AU - Hanna,Rema AU - Olken,Benjamin A. AU - Tobias,Julia TI - Targeting the Poor: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Indonesia JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 15980 PY - 2010 Y2 - May 2010 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15980 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15980.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Vivi Alatas World Bank Jakarta Stock Exchange Building Tower 2, 12th & 13th Floor Jakarta, Indonesia E-Mail: valatas@worldbank.org Abhijit Banerjee MIT Department of Economics E52-252d 50 Memorial Drive Cambridge, MA 02142-1347 Tel: 617/253-8855 Fax: 617/253-1330 E-Mail: banerjee@mit.edu Rema Hanna Kennedy School of Government Harvard University 79 JFK Street Cambridge, MA 02138 Tel: 617/496-1140 Fax: 617/496-5747 E-Mail: Rema_Hanna@hks.harvard.edu Benjamin A. Olken Department of Economics MIT 50 Memorial Drive Cambridge, MA 02142-1347 Tel: 617/588-1437 Fax: 617/868-2742 E-Mail: bolken@mit.edu Julia Tobias Stanford University Department of Political Science 616 Serra St. Stanford, CA, 94305 E-Mail: julia.tobias@gmail.com AB - In developing countries, identifying the poor for redistribution or social insurance is challenging because the government lacks information about people’s incomes. This paper reports the results of a field experiment conducted in 640 Indonesian villages that investigated two main approaches to solving this problem: proxy-means tests, where a census of hard-to-hide assets is used to predict consumption, and community-based targeting, where villagers rank everyone on a scale from richest to poorest. When poverty is defined using per-capita expenditure and the common PPP$2 per day threshold, we find that community-based targeting performs worse in identifying the poor than proxy-means tests, particularly near the threshold. This worse performance does not appear to be due to elite capture. Instead, communities appear to be using a different concept of poverty: the results of community-based methods are more correlated with how individual community members rank each other and with villagers’ self-assessments of their own status than per-capita expenditure. Consistent with this, the community-based methods result in higher satisfaction with beneficiary lists and the targeting process. ER -