Finding the poor vs. measuring their poverty: exploring the drivers of targeting effectiveness in Indonesia

Adama Bari Bah, Samuel Bazzi, Sudarno Sumarto (ssumarto@smeru.or.id) and Julia Tobias

No 8342, Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank

Abstract: Centralized targeting registries are increasingly used to allocate social assistance benefits in developing countries. There are two key design issues that matter for targeting accuracy: (i) which households to survey for inclusion in the registry and (ii) how to rank surveyed households. The authors attempt to identify their relative importance by evaluating Indonesia's Unified Database for Social Protection Programs (UDB), among the largest targeting registries in the world, used to provide social assistance to over 25 million households. Linking administrative data with an independent household survey, they find that the UDB system is more progressive than previous, program-specific targeting approaches. However, simulating an alternative targeting system based on enumerating all households, they find a one-third reduction in undercoverage of the poor compared to focusing on households registered in the UDB. Overall, there are large gains in targeting performance from improving the initial registration stage relative to the ranking stage.

Date: 2018-02-20
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Finding the Poor vs. Measuring Their Poverty: Exploring the Drivers of Targeting Effectiveness in Indonesia (2019)
Working Paper: Finding the Poor vs. Measuring Their Poverty: Exploring the Drivers of Targeting Effectiveness in Indonesia (2014)
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