Designing Anti-Poverty Programs in Emerging Economies in the 21st Century: Lessons from Indonesia for the World

Benjamin Olken

Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies, 2019, vol. 55, issue 3, 319-339

Abstract: Governments of developing countries around the world have dramatically expanded social protection programs for the poor in recent decades. In doing so, they face a host of challenges in the targeting, design and implementation of these programs. In this paper, I describe the results from more than a decade of collaboration with the Indonesian government to understand how best to tackle these challenges, drawing primarily on evidence from randomised controlled trials. I highlight results that show the advantages of both community-based targeting and self-targeting, the importance of tangible information about beneficiaries’ rights in minimising leakage, and the remarkable impacts of conditional cash transfers in the medium term. I also describe several recent studies that use randomisation at scale to generate policy-relevant evidence.

Date: 2019
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DOI: 10.1080/00074918.2019.1690411

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