IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/alo/isipdp/04-16.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Poverty targeting in public programs: A comparison of alternative nonparametric methods

Author

Listed:
  • Isha Dewan

    (Indian Statistical Institute, New Delhi)

  • Rohini Somanathan

    (Indian Statistical Institute, New Delhi)

Abstract

Very poor households may be excluded from public programs intended for their benefit for a variety of reasons as lack information, a permanent residence or membershiip in social networks. We are interested in methods of testing for such exclusion based on independently drawn samples of program participants and non-participants. We discuss three alternative nonparametric procedures; sign tests, tests for stochastic dominance and a test for distribution crossing. In the cases where there is a poverty threshold below which program participation is difficult, our simulation results suggests that the last of these test procedures is the most powrful. we apply this test to data from a microfinance program in India and find evidence that the poorest households in the area were largely outside the program.

Suggested Citation

  • Isha Dewan & Rohini Somanathan, 2004. "Poverty targeting in public programs: A comparison of alternative nonparametric methods," Discussion Papers 04-16, Indian Statistical Institute, Delhi.
    • Handle: RePEc:alo:isipdp:04-16
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.isid.ac.in/~pu/dispapers/dp04-16.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Christina Paxson & Norbert R. Schady, 2002. "The Allocation and Impact of Social Funds: Spending on School Infrastructure in Peru," The World Bank Economic Review, World Bank, vol. 16(2), pages 297-319, August.
    2. James J. Heckman & Jeffrey A. Smith, 2004. "The Determinants of Participation in a Social Program: Evidence from a Prototypical Job Training Program," Journal of Labor Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 22(2), pages 243-298, April.
    3. Satya R. Chakravarty & Pietro Muliere, 2003. "Welfare indicators: A review and new perspectives. 1. Measurement of inequality," Metron - International Journal of Statistics, Dipartimento di Statistica, Probabilità e Statistiche Applicate - University of Rome, vol. 0(3), pages 457-497.
    4. repec:pri:rpdevs:morduch_microfinance_poor is not listed on IDEAS
    5. Jonathan Morduch, 1998. "Does Microfinance Really Help the Poor? New Evidence from Flagship Programs in Bangladesh," Working Papers 198, Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Research Program in Development Studies..
    6. Anderson, Gordon, 1996. "Nonparametric Tests of Stochastic Dominance in Income Distributions," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 64(5), pages 1183-1193, September.
    7. Schmid, Friedrich & Trede, Mark, 1998. "A Kolmogorov-type test for second-order stochastic dominance," Statistics & Probability Letters, Elsevier, vol. 37(2), pages 183-193, February.
    8. Chen, Guijing & Chen, Jiahua & Chen, Yuming, 2002. "Statistical inference on comparing two distribution functions with a possible crossing point," Statistics & Probability Letters, Elsevier, vol. 60(3), pages 329-341, December.
    9. Charles M. Beach & Russell Davidson, 1983. "Distribution-Free Statistical Inference with Lorenz Curves and Income Shares," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 50(4), pages 723-735.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Sagarika Dey, 2017. "Assessing the Poverty Impact of India’s Largest Livelihood Security Programme: A Study Based on 68th Round of NSSO," Journal of Development Policy and Practice, , vol. 2(1), pages 56-70, January.
    2. Jean-Marie Baland & Rohini Somanathan & Lore Vandewalle, 2019. "Socially Disadvantaged Groups and Microfinance in India," Economic Development and Cultural Change, University of Chicago Press, vol. 67(3), pages 537-569.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Isha Dewan, 2008. "Poverty targeting in public programs: A Comparison of Some Nonparametric Tests and their Application to Indian Microfinance," Working Papers id:1516, eSocialSciences.
    2. Amin, Sajeda & Rai, Ashok S. & Topa, Giorgio, 2003. "Does microcredit reach the poor and vulnerable? Evidence from northern Bangladesh," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 70(1), pages 59-82, February.
    3. David Lander & David Gunawan & William Griffiths & Duangkamon Chotikapanich, 2020. "Bayesian assessment of Lorenz and stochastic dominance," Canadian Journal of Economics/Revue canadienne d'économique, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 53(2), pages 767-799, May.
    4. Horvath, Lajos & Kokoszka, Piotr & Zitikis, Ricardas, 2006. "Testing for stochastic dominance using the weighted McFadden-type statistic," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 133(1), pages 191-205, July.
    5. Mehmet Pinar & Thanasis Stengos & M. Ege Yazgan, 2018. "Quantile forecast combination using stochastic dominance," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 55(4), pages 1717-1755, December.
    6. Mehmet Pinar, 2015. "Measuring world governance: revisiting the institutions hypothesis," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 48(2), pages 747-778, March.
    7. Wen-Hao Chen & Jean-Yves Duclos, 2011. "Testing for poverty dominance: an application to Canada," Canadian Journal of Economics, Canadian Economics Association, vol. 44(3), pages 781-803, August.
    8. David Lander & David Gunawan & William E. Griffiths & Duangkamon Chotikapanich, 2016. "Bayesian Assessment of Lorenz and Stochastic Dominance Using a Mixture of Gamma Densities," Department of Economics - Working Papers Series 2023, The University of Melbourne.
    9. Roosen J. & Hennessy D.A., 2004. "Testing for the Monotone Likelihood Ratio Assumption," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, American Statistical Association, vol. 22, pages 358-366, July.
    10. Mehmet Pinar & Thanasis Stengos & Nikolas Topaloglou, 2013. "Measuring human development: a stochastic dominance approach," Journal of Economic Growth, Springer, vol. 18(1), pages 69-108, March.
    11. Mehmet Pinar & Thanasis Stengos & M. Ege Yazgan, 2012. "Is there an Optimal Forecast Combination? A Stochastic Dominance Approach to Forecast Combination Puzzle," Working Paper series 17_12, Rimini Centre for Economic Analysis.
    12. Post, Thierry & Karabatı, Selçuk & Arvanitis, Stelios, 2018. "Portfolio optimization based on stochastic dominance and empirical likelihood," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 206(1), pages 167-186.
    13. Gravel, Nicolas & Moyes, Patrick, 2012. "Ethically robust comparisons of bidimensional distributions with an ordinal attribute," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 147(4), pages 1384-1426.
    14. Zhuo Qiao & Wing-Keung Wong, 2015. "Which is a better investment choice in the Hong Kong residential property market: a big or small property?," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 47(16), pages 1670-1685, April.
    15. Frank A. Cowell & Emmanuel Flachaire, 2014. "Statistical Methods for Distributional Analysis," Working Papers halshs-01115996, HAL.
    16. Russell Davidson, 2010. "Innis Lecture: Inference on income distributions," Canadian Journal of Economics, Canadian Economics Association, vol. 43(4), pages 1122-1148, November.
    17. Jean-Yves Duclos & Joan Esteban & Debraj Ray, 2004. "Polarization: Concepts, Measurement, Estimation," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 72(6), pages 1737-1772, November.
    18. Stelios Arvanitis & Thierry Post & Nikolas Topaloglou, 2021. "Stochastic Bounds for Reference Sets in Portfolio Analysis," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 67(12), pages 7737-7754, December.
    19. Francesco Andreoli, 2018. "Robust Inference for Inverse Stochastic Dominance," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 36(1), pages 146-159, January.
    20. Daniel Sotelsek-Salem & Ismael Ahamdanech-Zarco & John Bishop, 2012. "Dominance testing for ‘pro-poor’ growth with an application to European growth," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 43(2), pages 723-739, October.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:alo:isipdp:04-16. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Debasis Mishra (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/isindin.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.