A Poor Means Test? Econometric Targeting in Africa

Abstract

Proxy-means testing is a popular method of poverty targeting with imperfect information.In a now widely-used version, a regression for log consumption calibrates a proxy-means test score based on chosen covariates, which is then implemented for targeting out-of-sample.In this paper, the performance of various proxy-means testing methods is assessed using data for nine African countries.Standard proxy-means testing helps filter out the nonpoor, but excludes many poor people, thus diminishing the impact on poverty.Some methodological changes perform better, with a poverty-quantile method dominating in most cases.Even so, either a basic-income scheme or transfers using a simple demographic scorecard are found to do as well, or almost as well, in reducing poverty.However, even with a budget sufficient to eliminate poverty with full information, none of these targeting methods brings the poverty rate below about three-quarters of its initial value.The prevailing methods are particularly deficient in reaching the poorest.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 64 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.