188 | Revisiting Targeting in Social Assistance
registration, assessment of needs and conditions, eligibility and enrollment decisions, determination of benefits and services, notification and onboarding, and provision of benefits and services. In particular, it highlights that “targeting failures” can happen at any step of the chain and discusses the roles of IDs, social registries, payment mechanisms, and adaptive social protection. Chapter 5 relates the concerns raised in this chapter to the choice of targeting method. It first observes the evolution of targeting practice over the past two decades. It then outlines a framework for choosing method(s), accounting for fit-for-purpose with respect to program objectives and feasibility in different country contexts. Each method is assessed in the light of this framework, and quantitative simulations are introduced to help select methods. Chapter 6 looks at notions of data and inferences and how they connect to some of the options among the methods. The chapter reviews the nature of data for inferring eligibility. The rest of the chapter provides an in-depth, technical overview of each of the methods considered—geographic, means testing, hybrid means testing, proxy means testing, and communitybased testing—considering best practices, how big data and new inference methods influence them, and how they can be adapted for shocks.
Notes 1. For example, the United Nations Household Survey Capability Program defines a household as a group of people who live together, pool their money, and eat at least one meal a day together (United Nations 1989). Eurostat defines a household in the context of surveys on social conditions or income, such as the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions or Household Budget Survey, as a housekeeping unit or, operationally, as a social unit: having common arrangements, sharing household expenses or daily needs, or in a shared common residence (https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained /i ndex.php/Glossary:Household_-_social_statistics#:~:text=A%20 household%2C%20in%20the%20context,in%20a%20shared%20 common%20residence). 2. An adult equivalence scale is an adjustment made in calculating household welfare that accounts for its demographic composition, with the underlying hypothesis that people of different ages have different needs. For example, if food is the largest item in consumption and children need fewer calories than adults, they would have a weight less than one, in proportion to established scales of caloric need by age and sex. Economies of scale attempt to capture the idea that two people together can live more cheaply than two people separately. For example, it takes less than twice the fuel to heat a larger cooking pot, housing will be less than twice as large, and consumer durables such as a television or refrigerator can be shared.
