Targeting the Poor and Smallholder Farmers Empirical Evidence from Malawi

Nazaire Houssou and Manfred Zeller

Quarterly Journal of International Agriculture, 2010, vol. 49, issue 4, 18

Abstract: The recent international financial crisis and the steady decrease in development assistance have put many poor countries under increasing pressure to target more accurately their public spendings at the poor and the population in need. However, further progress is hampered by the lack of accurate and operationally reliable methods for identifying the targeted population affected by poverty. Therefore, this paper develops low cost and fairly accurate models for improving the targeting efficiency of development policies. Using household-level survey data from Malawi, this research applies various econometric methods along with out-of-sample tests to develop operational poverty targeting models for the country. Though there is a scope for further improvements, the results show that the developed models can considerably improve the poverty outreach of development policies compared to the currently used targeting mechanisms in the country. Likewise, this research can be replicated in other developing countries.

Keywords: Community/Rural/Urban Development; Food Security and Poverty; International Development; Political Economy; Research Methods/Statistical Methods (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/155557/files/4_Houssou.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Targeting the poor and smallholder farmers: empirical evidence from Malawi (2009)
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:ags:qjiage:155557

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.155557

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Quarterly Journal of International Agriculture from Humboldt-Universitaat zu Berlin Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().