Social Safety Nets in Tunisia: Comparison of Different Targeting Methods

This paper proposes two new approaches for targeting the beneficiaries of social benefit programs in Tunisia, such as the cash transfer and healthcare programs. The first approach is a mixed means test (MMT), which extends the proxy means test (PMT) model to explicitly combine both individual/household assessment and geographical targeting methods. The second approach is drawn from the identification step of the family of multidimensional poverty measures. Using the 2015 National Survey on Household Budget, Consumption, and Standard of Living, our results show that the targeting performances based on both approaches are considerably better than the existing programs. Specifically, the coverage rate of the poorest 10 percent using the MMT targeting model that combines individual/household and geographical scales is around 29 percent, nearly twice the coverage rate of the current PNAFN program. The MMT works well not only at the national level but also at the regional level. It allows us to minimize inclusion and exclusion errors for the poorest regions of Tunisia. Additionally, the proposed multidimensional approach identifies a higher number of beneficiaries compared to the selection process currently implemented in Tunisia. However, the inclusion of such a number of households in a social program may be constrained by the unavailability of monetary resources and the country’s financial situation. For this purpose, the deprivation targeting approach allows us to categorize potential beneficiaries into three mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive groups of households according to their degree of deprivation.