IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/wbecrv/v33y2019i3p573-597..html

Finding the Poor vs. Measuring Their Poverty: Exploring the Drivers of Targeting Effectiveness in Indonesia

Author

Listed:
  • Adama Bah
  • Samuel Bazzi
  • Sudarno Sumarto
  • Julia Tobias

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. We 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, we 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, we 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.

Suggested Citation

  • Adama Bah & Samuel Bazzi & Sudarno Sumarto & Julia Tobias, 2019. "Finding the Poor vs. Measuring Their Poverty: Exploring the Drivers of Targeting Effectiveness in Indonesia," The World Bank Economic Review, World Bank, vol. 33(3), pages 573-597.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:wbecrv:v:33:y:2019:i:3:p:573-597.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/wber/lhx020
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version below or

    for a different version of it.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Trachtman, Carly & Permana, Yudistira Hendra & Sahadewo, Gumilang Aryo, 2026. "How much do our neighbors really know? The limits of community-based targeting," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 178(C).
    2. Missbach, Leonard & Steckel, Jan Christoph & Vogt-Schilb, Adrien, 2024. "Cash transfers in the context of carbon pricing reforms in Latin America and the Caribbean," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 173(C).
    3. Adama Bah & Suahasil Nazara & Elan Satriawan, 2015. "Registro Único de Indonesia para los programas de protección social," Policy Research Brief 49, International Policy Centre.
    4. Hillebrecht, Michael & Klonner, Stefan & Pacere, Noraogo A., 2020. "Dynamic Properties of Poverty Targeting," Working Papers 0696, University of Heidelberg, Department of Economics.
    5. Matthew C. LaFevor & Alexandra G. Ponette-González & Rebecca Larson & Leah M. Mungai, 2021. "Spatial Targeting of Agricultural Support Measures: Indicator-Based Assessment of Coverages and Leakages," Land, MDPI, vol. 10(7), pages 1-17, July.
    6. Martin Wiegand, 2020. "Welfare Measurement and Poverty Targeting Based on Participatory Wealth Rankings," Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers 20-086/V, Tinbergen Institute.
    7. Tohari, Achmad & Parsons, Christopher & Rammohan, Anu, 2017. "Targeting Poverty under Complementarities: Evidence from Indonesia's Unified Targeting System," IZA Discussion Papers 10968, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    8. Adama Bah & Suahasil Nazara & Elan Satriawan, 2015. "Indonesia’s Single Registry for Social Protection Programmes," Policy Research Brief (Arab) 49, International Policy Centre.
    9. Christophe Muller, 2018. "Optimal Cash Transfers with Distribution Regressions: An Application to Egypt at the Dawn of the XXIst Century," AMSE Working Papers 1802, Aix-Marseille School of Economics, France.
    10. Fanny Salignac & Julien Hanoteau & Ioana Ramia, 2022. "Financial Resilience: A Way Forward Towards Economic Development in Developing Countries," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 160(1), pages 1-33, February.
    11. Anu Rammohan & Achmad Tohari, 2024. "Food vouchers and dietary diversity: evidence from social protection reform in Indonesia," Food Security: The Science, Sociology and Economics of Food Production and Access to Food, Springer;The International Society for Plant Pathology, vol. 16(1), pages 161-184, February.
    12. Adama Bah & Suahasil Nazara & Elan Satriawan, 2015. "Le registre unique indonésien à l’usage des programmes de protection sociale," Policy Research Brief (French) 49, International Policy Centre.
    13. Priebe, Jan & Sumarto, Sudarno, 2025. "Reducing child marriages through CCTs: Evidence from a large-scale policy intervention in Indonesia," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 242(C).
    14. Anu Rammohan & Achmad Tohari, 2023. "Rural poverty and labour force participation: Evidence from Indonesia’s Village fund program," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 18(6), pages 1-15, June.
    15. Christophe Muller, 2016. "Optimal transfers with distribution regressions: An application to Egypt at the dawn of the XXIst century," WIDER Working Paper Series wp-2016-179, World Institute for Development Economic Research (UNU-WIDER).
    16. Hillebrecht, Michael & Klonner, Stefan & Pacere, Noraogo A., 2023. "The dynamics of poverty targeting," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 161(C).
    17. Lilik Sugiharti & Miguel Angel Esquivias & Mohd Shahidan Shaari & Ari Dwi Jayanti & Abdul Rahim Ridzuan, 2023. "Indonesia’s poverty puzzle: Chronic vs. transient poverty dynamics," Cogent Economics & Finance, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 11(2), pages 2267927-226, October.
    18. Rema Hanna & Benjamin A. Olken, 2018. "Universal Basic Incomes vs. Targeted Transfers: Anti-Poverty Programs in Developing Countries," NBER Working Papers 24939, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    19. Tohari, Achmad & Parsons, Christopher & Rammohan, Anu, 2019. "Targeting poverty under complementarities: Evidence from Indonesia's unified targeting system," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 140(C), pages 127-144.
    20. Della Guardia, Anne & Lake, Milli & Schnitzer, Pascale, 2022. "Selective inclusion in cash transfer programs: Unintended consequences for social cohesion," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 157(C).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • D1 - Microeconomics - - Household Behavior
    • I3 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty
    • I38 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty - - - Government Programs; Provision and Effects of Welfare Programs

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:wbecrv:v:33:y:2019:i:3:p:573-597.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/wrldbus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.