ABSTRACT
This chapter describes different types of social programs which all attempt to take, and maintain, people out of poverty. Targeting is an instrument to make social programs more effective for their intended purposes under a budget constraint. When targeting a program, it is important to avoid both excluding the poor and wasting money in including the non-poor. We can compare the relative effectiveness of the various targeting methods by observing how pro-poor the anti-poverty interventions have been according to the method used. By relying on correlates of poverty such as education, housing, and ownership of durable goods, proxy means tests are better at identifying the chronically poor than the transitory poor. Community-based targeting consists of delegating the selection of beneficiaries to the community. At the community level, projects may require co-participation in labor or resources to the chosen project for the community to qualify. Demographic targeting of poverty uses indicators such as age and gender.
