ABSTRACT
Poverty has become the most prominent problem that governments of both developed and developing countries face. Over the years, a variety of policies and approaches have been developed to tackle this problem. The targeting approach, as opposed to the universalistic approach, is one of the most prevalent approaches (see Braun et al., 2000). Poverty targeting includes approaches ranging from targeting by activity, targeting by indicators (means testing or household indicators), targeting by location and self-targeting (Besley and Kanbur, 1993; Bigman and Fofack, 2000; World Bank, 2000), but this chapter focuses only on geographical or area-based targeting, using a case approach to analyze the area-based scheme as it has been applied within Thailand, and it contributes to debates on the effectiveness of the targeting approach.
