Finding the Poor vs. Measuring their Poverty: Exploring the Drivers of Targeting Effectiveness in Indonesia
Open accessAbstract
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.
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The 2008 Indonesian BLT program had roughly 34 percent inclusion error, above the social optimum but still more narrowly targeted than a universal basic income.
“Bah, Bazzi, Sumarto, and Tobias (2018) calculate that inclusion error in the 2008 Indonesian BLT program was roughly 34 percent, which is higher than the social optimum, but still substantially more narrowly targeted than a universal basic income.”
From Universal Basic Incomes versus Targeted Transfers: Anti-Poverty Programs in Developing Countries (2018) · cites this paper as Bah, Bazzi, Sumarto, and Tobias (2018)
The available passages (section labeled “117 downloads,” no page number) discuss targeting registries and undercoverage, but do not address the claimed BLT inclusion-error estimate. Searches for “2008 BLT,” “34 percent,” “inclusion error,” “social optimum,” and “universal basic income” found no passage that verifies the estimate or comparisons. (LLM, conf=0.72)
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Universal Basic Incomes versus Targeted Transfers: Anti-Poverty Programs in Developing Countries
Hanna, R., & Olken, B. A. (2018) · Journal of Economic Perspectives · doi:10.1257/jep.32.4.201 · Cited by 299 · see citing works
- Authors
- Bah, A., Bazzi, S., Sumarto, S., & Tobias, J.
- Venue
- World Bank, Washington, DC eBooks
- Publisher
- World Bank, Washington, DC
- Published
- 2018-02
- OpenAlex
- W2982732013
- Cited by
- 5
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2024: 1 · 2023: 1 · 2022: 2 · 2018: 1
- Type
- report
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- cc-by
- Locations
- World Bank, Washington, DC eBooks (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- The World Bank Open Knowledge Repository (World Bank) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Safety Research › Poverty, Education, and Child Welfare
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Income, Poverty, and Inequality
- Social Sciences › Political Science and International Relations › Public Administration in Developing Nations
- Keywords
- poverty targeting, social assistance, targeting accuracy, household registration, administrative data linkage
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