Effective Targeting of the Ultra Poor

Rema Hanna & Ben Olken (MIT)

Our research team partnered with Indonesia's Ministry of National Development and Planning and other agencies in devising a unified targeting system to select the beneficiaries of multiple social programs. We will determine whether self-targeting or community-based targeting works best in identifying those who live on under a dollar per day and are therefore eligible for the programs. We will also calculate the program's cost-effectiveness and test whether the efficacy of the targeting methodology varies by the underlying characteristics of the area. Moving forward, we plan to work with the Indonesian government to understand leakages in the transfer programs and how to reduce them.

Research Partner:

J-PAL Southeast Asia

Funding:

World Bank, the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie), AUSAID

Related Publications:

Ordeal Mechanisms in Targeting: Theory and Evidence from a Field Experiment in Indonesia
Rema Hanna (with Vivi Alatas, Abhijit Banerjee, Benjamin A. Olken, Ririn Purnamasari, and Matthew Wai-Poi)
CID Working Paper #254, 2012

Targeting the Poor: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Indonesia
Rema Hanna (with Vivi Alatas, Abhijit Banerjee, Benjamin A. Olken, and Julia Tobias)
American Economic Review 102(4): 1206-1240, 2012

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