2004 UC Proceedings Abstract
Poverty Alleviation Through Geographic Targeting: Does Disaggregation Help? Track: State and Local Government Author(s): Peter Lanjouw This paper takes "poverty maps" for three countries, Ecuador, Madagascar and Cambodia, to ask whether, and to what extent, poverty targeting improves as geographic sub-groups are defined at progressively lower levels of spatial disaggregation. The paper distinguishes between "optimal" use of a poverty map, and the kind of use that might be made of such maps in practice. The paper generally finds that fine geographic targeting of a given budget yields a bigger impact on poverty than a uniform lump-sum transfer and that, in the case of optimal use of the map, targeting improves monotonically with the degree of disaggregation. The paper demonstrates however, that even with very fine targeting, spatial targeting is not sufficient to eliminate poverty altogether. The paper argues that fine geographic targeting should be combined with within-community targeting based on either self-selection or alternative targeting mechanisms. Peter Lanjouw The World Bank DECRG Room 214, Giannini Hall ##3310, ARE, UC Berkeley Berkeley , CA 94720 US Phone: 510-643-3250 E-mail: planjouw@worldbank.org |
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