Notes

140 | Revisiting Targeting in Social Assistance

Notes

1. The estimates are simple in the sense that they do not take into account behavioral responses to the programs. 2. http://www.worldbank.org/aspire/. 3. The social assistance literature has generated a huge range of impact evaluations on a long vector of outcomes related to health, mental health, education, work, and livelihoods that programs can have through increasing income via transfers or the various and often associated elements of messaging and information, behavioral nudges, conditions for service use, job search, or work that can be implicit or explicit design elements of social assistance programs. This vector of outcomes is of paramount interest in social policy but beyond the subject of this book. It is the subject of many other papers and reviews; thus, a synopsis of that literature is not provided. 4. ADePT Social Protection is a free software platform developed by the World

Bank to automate the generation of an array of indicators to assess the performance of social protection programs. 5. Less any transaction costs incurred from having applied to a program or psychic costs from having been excluded from the program. 6. Yemtsov et al. (2018). 7. http://www.worldbank.org/aspire/. 8. The change in the poverty gap gives more weight to a transfer to a very poor person than to one just below the poverty line. In that sense, it moves toward the ideal of continuous welfare weighting. The change in the poverty gap is commonly used and intuitive to understand. It falls short of ideal as it truncates consideration at the poverty line/welfare threshold. As described in chapter 7, alternative measures, such as distributional characteristics, would be preferable, but they are not regularly captured in ASPIRE’s cross-country work, so they are not used here. 9. The World Bank’s State of Safety Nets 2018 report contains data on coverage and incidence for 96 countries since 2008 (World Bank 2018). Since it was published, more recent data have become available for 54 countries already in the database and two countries were added. 10. The countries were classified by income group using their standing at the time the analysis was done in May 2020. 11. The household surveys only capture national programs of significant size, and the subset of programs that target individuals, families, or households.

Some of the social assistance programs captured in the ASPIRE administrative database include support for institutionalized social services, for example, for children deprived of parental care, persons with disabilities, or the elderly; these beneficiaries are not covered in the sample frame of a household survey. 12. For countries that happen to observe in their household questionnaire only a single program in a category, it is possible to look at the lines as program specific. The study team examined the documentation for every country and program category to see whether meaningful results could be produced by looking at that subset. It seemed that the programs and countries that were observed

Unpacking the Empirics of Targeting in Low- and Middle-Income Countries | 141

were not representative of the larger world experience of social assistance.

Single programs are much more likely to be observed in the categories of conditional cash transfer and school feeding programs. 13. ASPIRE focuses on data from traditional International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and International Development Association client countries, so its coverage of high-income countries is not the full set for the world (for example, the earliest industrializers, Europe, North America, Japan, Australia, and so forth). Thus, the higher income sometime-borrowers from the World

Bank for which ASPIRE has reported survey data since 2014 are Chile, Croatia,

Mauritius, Panama, Poland, Romania, and Uruguay. 14. From here, the category “other social assistance” is dropped because it covers such a heterogenous mix of programs and designs that it is difficult to draw general conclusions. 15. Beneficiary incidence is the proportion of beneficiaries in each quintile of the population’s welfare distribution. Benefit incidence is the transfer amount received by each quintile as a percentage of total transfers received by the population. 16. Ley Nº 15.728h, Republic of Uruguay. 17. The story of Mongolia’s Child Money Program has evolved over time. After 2016, the program drew on general revenues for finance and became targeted with varying degrees of coverage. However, by 2019 (and currently), it is back to being universal (UNICEF 2020). 18. This is the poverty rate using the international standard of $3.20/day/person rate for lower-middle-income countries; national poverty lines use a different standard. 19. Two UCT programs are observed in Montenegro’s 2014 Household Budget

Survey: the guaranteed minimum income program and child allowances.

However, the variable for child allowances only reports six observations; therefore, this section considers the UCT category as mainly representing the guaranteed minimum income program. 20. This subsection only uses observations for which there is clear valuation of the benefit levels. This restricts the analysis to the programs with benefits in cash—

UCT, conditional cash transfers, social pensions, and public works. 21. https://socialprotection.org/discover/programmes/asignaciones-familiares -plan-equidad-family-allowances-equity-plan. 22. Two conditional cash transfer programs are observed in Panama’s 2018

Encuesta de Mercado Laboral: Red de Oportunidades, which covers 5.7 percent of the total population, and SENAPAN, a smaller program covering less than 1 percent of the population. Panama also has two additional programs that target poor individuals: Programa Ángel Guardián (for people with disabilities) and B/.120 a los 65 (for adults 65 years and older who do not receive a contributory pension). Although Panama’s government considers that these programs are conditional cash transfers due to the inclusion of conditions, ASPIRE classifies them as social pensions since their conditions are not related to investments in human capital, such as school attendance, immunizations, health check-ups, and so forth. See annex 2C.