Proxy Means Testing Vulnerability to Measurement Errors ?

Jules Gazeaud

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: Proxy Means Testing (PMT) is a popular method to target the poor in developing countries. PMT usually relies on survey-based consumption data and assumes random measurement errors – an assumption that has been challenged by recent literature. Using a survey experiment conducted in Tanzania, this paper brings causal evidence on the impact of non-random errors on PMT performances. Results show that non-random errors bias the coefficients from PMT models, resulting in a 5 to 27 per cent reduction in PMT predictive performances. Moreover, non-random errors induce a 10 to 34 per cent increase in the incidence of targeting errors when poverty is defined in absolute terms. More reassuringly, impacts on the ranking of households are smaller and essentially non-significant. Taken together, these results indicate that PMT performances are quite vulnerable to non-random errors when the objective is to target absolutely poor households, but remain largely unaffected when the objective is to target a fixed share of the population.

Keywords: Social protection; Targeting; Proxy Means Testing PMT; Measurement errors (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-11-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://uca.hal.science/hal-03157274v1
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published in The Journal of Development Studies, 2020, 56 (11), pp.2113-2133. ⟨10.1080/00220388.2020.1715942⟩

Downloads: (external link)
https://uca.hal.science/hal-03157274v1/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Proxy Means Testing Vulnerability to Measurement Errors? (2020)
Working Paper: Proxy Means Testing vulnerability to measurement errors? (2018)
Working Paper: Proxy Means Testing vulnerability to measurement errors? (2018)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-03157274

DOI: 10.1080/00220388.2020.1715942

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().