Publication Type

Journal Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

5-2007

Abstract

In this paper, we employ recently completed “poverty maps” for three countries as tools for an ex ante evaluation of the distributional incidence of geographic targeting of public resources. We simulate the impact on poverty of transferring an exogenously given budget to geographically defined sub-groups of the population according to their relative poverty status. We find large gains from targeting smaller administrative units, such as districts or villages. However, these gains are still far from the poverty reduction that would be possible had the planners had access to information on household level income or consumption. Our results indicate that a useful way forward might be to combine fine geographic targeting using a poverty map with within-community targeting mechanisms.

Keywords

Targeting, Poverty, Poverty maps

Discipline

Economic Policy | Income Distribution

Research Areas

Applied Microeconomics

Publication

Journal of Development Economics

Volume

83

Issue

1

First Page

198

Last Page

213

ISSN

0304-3878

Identifier

10.1016/j.jdeveco.2006.02.001

Publisher

Elsevier

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jdeveco.2006.02.001

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