Optimal income support targeting

Stefan Wachter () and Sebastian Galiani

International Tax and Public Finance, 2006, vol. 13, issue 6, 684 pages

Abstract: This paper considers the practical problem of distributing a fixed budget for poverty alleviation to a population whose poverty status is not directly observable. The solution we propose improves on the techniques that are commonly used in practice by taking both the concavity of the social welfare function and the entire conditional distribution of poverty status into account, and by endogenously determining the optimal transfer levels. We provide an algorithm to calculate the optimal transfers for any population of benefit applicants. Finally, we explain how our method is a generalization of statistical classification techniques and thus provide an intuitive discussion of the defects of currently operational methods. Copyright Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2006

Keywords: Classification; Poverty; Program design; Targeting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10797-006-6552-z (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Optimal Income Support Targeting (2005)
Working Paper: Optimal Income Support Targeting (2000)
Working Paper: Optimal Income Support Targeting (2000)
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:kap:itaxpf:v:13:y:2006:i:6:p:661-684

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ce/journal/10797/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10797-006-6552-z

Access Statistics for this article

International Tax and Public Finance is currently edited by Ronald B. Davies and Kimberly Scharf

More articles in International Tax and Public Finance from Springer, International Institute of Public Finance Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().