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Poverty Alleviation Through Geographic Targeting, Chris Elbers, Tomoki Fujii, Peter Lanjouw, Berk Ozler, Wesley Yin

Research Collection School Of Economics

In this paper, we employ recently completed “poverty maps” for three countries as tools for an ex ante evaluation of the distributional incidence of geographic targeting of public resources. We simulate the impact on poverty of transferring an exogenously given budget to geographically defined sub-groups of the population according to their relative poverty status. We find large gains from targeting smaller administrative units, such as districts or villages. However, these gains are still far from the poverty reduction that would be possible had the planners had access to information on household level income or consumption. Our results indicate that a …