Optimal Income Support Targeting

Sebastian Galiani and Stefan De Wachter
Additional contact information
Stefan De Wachter: University of Oxford

No 39, Working Papers from Universidad de San Andres, Departamento de Economia

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.

Keywords: classification; poverty; program design; targeting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C4 H2 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 28 pages
Date: 2001-09, Revised 2005-04
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://webacademicos.udesa.edu.ar/pub/econ/doc39.pdf Revised version, 2005 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Optimal income support targeting (2006)
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:sad:wpaper:39

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Universidad de San Andres, Departamento de Economia Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Maria Amelia Gibbons ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).