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The World Bank Research Observer Advance Access originally published online on September 2, 2009
The World Bank Research Observer 2009 24(2):205-231; doi:10.1093/wbro/lkp009
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development / THE WORLD BANK. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

How Relevant Is Targeting to the Success of an Antipoverty Program?

Martin Ravallion

Correspondence: Email address is mravallion{at}worldbank.org

Policy-oriented discussions often assume that "better targeting" implies larger impacts on poverty or more cost-effective interventions for fighting poverty. The literature on the economics of targeting warns against that assumption, but evidence has been scarce and the lessons from the literature have often been ignored by practitioners. This paper shows that standard measures of targeting performance are uninformative or even deceptive about the impacts on poverty, and cost-effectiveness in reducing poverty, of a large cash transfer program in China. The results suggest that in program design and evaluation, it would be better to focus directly on the program's outcomes for poor people than to rely on prevailing measures of targeting.

JEL codes: I32, I38, O15


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