Targeting the poor in Mexico: an evaluation of the selection of households into PROGRESA
Article Abstract:
In this paper, we conduct an evaluation of the targeting method used by Health Education and Nutrition Program (PROGRESA) of Mexico to identify beneficiary households. We address two key questions: (a) How well does PROGRESA's targeting perform; and (b) How does the program perform in terms of its impact on poverty alleviation relative to other feasible methods and transfer schemes. The first question is accomplished by comparing PROGRESA's method to an alternative selection method based on household consumption, which is our preferred measure of welfare. We employ the concepts of undercoverage and leakage and find that PROGRESA selection method is more effective in identifying the extremely poor localities or households but less so when it comes to distinguishing among localities or households in the middle of the scale. To address the second question, we compare the potential impact of PROGRESA on poverty alleviation against uniform transfers that involve no targeting at all, targeting based on consumption, and geographic targeting (i.e., targeting at the locality level rather than at the household level). We find that PROGRESA's method of targeting households outperforms uniform coverage and targeting at the locality level in terms of reducing the poverty gap and severity of poverty indices, even after taking into account the economic costs of targeting. But, the closeness of PROGRESA's performance to what could be achieved by geographic targeting alone raises some serious questions about the costs and benefits associated with the practice of household targeting within poor localities. Key words -- education, health, Mexico, nutrition, targeting, poverty, PROGRESA
Publication Name: World Development
Subject: International relations
ISSN: 0305-750X
Year: 2001
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What Do We Know About Economic Growth? Or, Why Don't We Know Very Much?
Article Abstract:
The last 10 years has seen an explosion in cross country econometric studies of growth, driven by two factors--new mathematical models of the growth process that lend themselves to econometric testing, and new data sets that make such testing possible. This paper looks at a selective review of these studies. It concludes that the results are disappointing in that no model has proven robust to trial by repeated regression. The paper suggests some reasons for this--including that the tested models tend to be ahistorical and over-simple in terms of their causal accounts. It concludes with possible lessons for econometric work in this area. [C] 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. Key words -- economic growth, theory, cross country regressions
Publication Name: World Development
Subject: International relations
ISSN: 0305-750X
Year: 2001
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