Title: Targeting the poor
Description: "In developing countries, identifying the poor for redistribution or social insurance is challenging because the government lacks information about people's incomes.  This paper reports the results of a field experiment conducted in 640 Indonesian villages that investigated two main approaches to solving this problem: proxy-means tests, where a census of hard-to-hide assets is used to predict consumption, and community-based targeting, where villagers rank everyone on a scale from richest to poorest.  When poverty is defined using per-capita expenditure and the common PPP$2 per day threshold, we find that community-based targeting performs worse in identifying the poor than proxy-means tests, particularly near the threshold.  This worse performance does not appear to be due to elite capture.  Instead, communities appear to be using a different concept of poverty: the results of community-based methods are more correlated with how individual community members rank each other and with villagers' self-assessments of their own status than per-capita expenditure.  Consistent with this, the community-based methods result in higher satisfaction with beneficiary lists and the targeting process"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site.