Targeting social transfers to the poor has become a means to improve poverty reduction programs. In Indonesia, the government has launched several large-scale, targeted programs, such as the Direct Cash Transfers (BLT), Health Insurance for the People (Jamkesmas) and Rice for the Poor (Raskin). Ensuring that limited program resources reach the poor instead of non-poor households remains an ongoing challenge. To improve targeting performance, Indonesia’s Ministry of National Development and Planning (BAPPENAS) has asked World Bank and J-PAL to provide technical assistance in devising a unified targeting system that can be used to select the recipients of multiple social programs. As part of this work, This study aims to test the efficacy of different targeting methods in Program Keluarga Harapan (PKH), Indonesia’s Conditional Cash Transfers (CCT) program will be evaluated. Typically, targeting is achieved through Proxy-Means Testing, where the government collects data on asset possession and uses this data to predict who falls below the poverty line. However, this method often results in high error rates (upwards of 40%) and a lack of community satisfaction. In this project, we will focus on two alternative targeting systems that feature greater community involvement: (1) Self-targeting method, wherein the poor apply to be part of the program and are independently verified, and (2) Community inclusion method, wherein the communities modify the government’s existing recipient list.
External Link(s)
Citation
Alatas, Vivi et al. 2013. "Effective Targeting of Anti-Poverty Programs II." AEA RCT Registry. November 20. https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.99-1.0.
We randomly allocated each village to one of two three targeting methodologies: • Proxy Means Testing (PMT): the government collects information on assets and demographic characteristics to create a “proxy” for household consumption or income, and this proxy is in turn used for targeting. • Community Based Targeting: the government allows the community or some part of it (e.g. local leaders) to select the beneficiaries through a pre-specified process. • Self-targeting: In the economic literature, this is called an ordeal mechanism. It imposes requirements on the program that are differentially costly for poor and rich people, dissuading the rich but not the poor from participating.
Intervention Start Date
2011-01-17
Intervention End Date
2011-03-28
Primary Outcomes (end points)
Mistargeting, exclusion error, inclusion error
Primary Outcomes (explanation)
Secondary Outcomes (end points)
Secondary Outcomes (explanation)
Experimental Design
The project was carried out during the 2011 expansion of PKH (Indonesia’s conditional cash transfer Program) to new areas. We chose 6 districts and within these districts, we randomly selected a total of 600 villages. Each of the these villages was randomly allocated to one of three methods for determining which households would be beneficiaries of the program—self-targeting, community targeting, and the status quo, where households are automatically enrolled in PKH based on their PMT score.
Experimental Design Details
Randomization Method
Computer random number generator
Randomization Unit
Village
Was the treatment clustered?
Yes
Sample size: planned number of clusters
600 villages
Sample size: planned number of observations
9 households per village
Sample size (or number of clusters) by treatment arms
200 villages got self-targeting treatment, 200 villages got community targeting and and 200 villages got status quo.
Minimum detectable effect size for main outcomes (accounting for sample design and clustering)