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                  enGender Impact: The World Bank’s Gender Impact Evaluation Database



                Targeting the Poor: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Indonesia

      Author(s)            Vivi Alatas, Abhijit Banerjee, Rema Hanna, Bejnamin Olken, Julia Tobias
      Contact              valatas@worldbank.org

      Country              Indonesia

  Organizing Theme         Voice and Agency

       Status              Completed

Intervention Category      Cash Transfer

       Sector              Social Protection
                           This paper reports an experiment in 640 Indonesian villages on three approaches to target
                           the poor: proxy means tests (PMT), where assets are used to predict consumption;
                           community targeting, where villagers rank everyone from richest to poorest; and a hybrid.
                           Defining poverty based on PPP$2 per capita consumption, community targeting and the
      Abstract
                           hybrid perform somewhat worse in identifying the poor than PMT, though not by enough
                           to significantly affect poverty outcomes for a typical program. Elite capture does not
                           explain these results. Instead, communities appear to apply a different concept of poverty.
                           Consistent with this finding, community targeting results in higher satisfaction.
 Gender Connection         Gender Informed Analysis

  Gender Outcomes          Participation or voice in community

     IE Design             Clustered Randomized Control Trial (Clustered at village level)
                           The government implemented a cash transfer program that distributed about $3 to
                           households that fell below location-specific poverty lines. In a third of the villages, the
    Intervention           government conducted a proxy means test to identify the beneficiaries. In another third of
                           the villages, community-based targeting was utilized. In the other third, a combination of
                           the two methods were used.
 Intervention Period       December 2008 - January 2009
                           The sample consists of 640 subvillages spread across three Indonesian provinces: North
                           Sumatra, South Sulawesi, and Central Java. Within the provinces 640 villages were
                           randomly selected with 30% urban and 70% rural locations. Each sub village contains on
  Sample population
                           average 54 households and has an elected or appointed administrative head. The study
                           randomly samples 8 households from each sub village plus the head of the sub village for a
                           total of 5756 households.
                           The study compares 3 targeting mechanisms: proxy means tests, community targeting, and
Comparison conditions
                           a combination of the 2.
   Unit of analysis        CTCT

  Evaluation Period        November 2008 - March 2009


   Last updated: 14 August 2013                                                                      1
                   enGender Impact: The World Bank’s Gender Impact Evaluation Database


                            The targeting methods were compared to a survey that identified a household as poor if its
                            consumption fell below $2 per day. Both the community and hybrid preform worse than
                            the proxy means testing (PMT) if $2 a day poverty is the standard. However, for the
        Results             poorest households community based targeting preforms just as well as PMT. The
                            differences in targeting accuracy between different strategies is not statistically significant.
                            The community methods resulted in higher satisfaction and greater legitimacy of the
                            process. Community targeting leads to 60% fewer complaints.
Primary study limitations   The study does not discuss limitations.

    Funding Source          World Bank Royal Netherlands Embassy trust fund
                            Alatas, V., Banerjee, A., Hanna, R., Olken, B. A., & Tobias, J. (2012). Targeting the Poor:
      Reference(s)          Evidence from a Field Experiment in Indonesia. The American Economic Review, 102(4),
                            1206-40.
    Link to Studies
                            http://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/aer.102.4.1206&title=
       Microdata




    Last updated: 14 August 2013                                                                          2