Targeting Social Transfers to the Poor in Mexico
33 Pages Posted: 23 Mar 2009
Date Written: March 2009
Abstract
Mexico's main social support program, Oportunidades, combines two methods to target cash to poor households: an initial self-selection by households who acquire knowledge about the program and apply for benefits, followed by an administrative determination of eligibility based on a means test. Self-selection improves targeting by excluding high-income households, while administrative targeting does so mainly by excluding middle-income households. The two methods are complementary: expanding program knowledge across households substantially increases applications from non-poor households, thus reinforcing the importance of administrative targeting. The paper shows that targeting can be further improved through redesigning the means test and differentiating transfers according to demographic characteristics.
Keywords: Working Papers
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?
Recommended Papers
-
Micro-Level Estimation of Welfare
By Peter F. Lanjouw, Jean O. Lanjouw, ...
-
Combining Census and Survey Data to Study Spatial Dimensions of Poverty a Case Study of Ecuador
By Peter F. Lanjouw and Jesko Hentschel
-
Crime and Local Inequality in South Africa
By Gabriel Demombynes and Berk Ozler
-
Picking the Poor: Indicators for Geographic Targeting in Peru
-
Poverty Comparisons with Noncompatible Data: Theory and Illustrations
By Jean O. Lanjouw and Peter F. Lanjouw
-
On the Unequal Inequality of Poor Communities
By Chris Elbers, Peter F. Lanjouw, ...
-
Poverty Alleviation Through Geographic Targeting: How Much Does Disaggregation Help?
By Chris Elbers, Tomoki Fujii, ...
-
Do School Facilities Matter? The Case of the Peruvian Social Fund (Foncodes)