Concerns about incentives and targeting naturally arise when cash transfers are used to fight poverty. The authors address these concerns in the context of China's Di Bao program, which uses means-tested transfers to try to assure that no registered urban resident has an income below a stipulated poverty line. There is little sign in the data of poverty traps due to high benefit withdrawal rates. Targeting performance is excellent by various measures. Di Bao appears to be better targeted than any other program in the developing world. However, all but one measure of targeting performance is found to be uninformative, or even deceptive, about impacts on poverty. The authors find that the majority of the poor are not receiving help, even with a generous allowance for measurement errors. While on paper, Di Bao would eliminate urban poverty, it falls well short of that ideal in practice.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Coady, David P. & Grosh, Margaret & Hoddinott, John, 2002.
"Targeting outcomes redux,"
FCND discussion papers
144, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).
[Downloadable!]
Other versions:
Coady, David P. & Grosh, Margaret & Hoddinott, John, 2002.
"Targeting outcomes redux,"
FCND briefs
144, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).
[Downloadable!]
Did you know? Each page is provided with a technical contact, in case something is not right with the supplied information. See under "publisher info".