IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/wbk/wbrwps/8605.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

A Proxy Means Test for Sri Lanka

Author

Listed:
  • Sebastian,Ashwini Rekha
  • Shivakumaran,Shivapragasam
  • Silwal,Ani Rudra
  • Newhouse,David Locke
  • Walker,Thomas
  • Yoshida,Nobuo

Abstract

This paper intends to inform the effort of the Sri Lankan government to reform the targeting efficacy of its social protection programs, in particular, Samurdhi, which currently distributes benefits based on self-reported income. The paper develops a proxy means test for Sri Lanka based on the Household Income and Expenditure Survey 2016 and evaluates its performance for targeting benefits of Samurdhi. The paper considers a range of models and policy parameters that could be applied depending on data availability and country preferences. The results indicate that switching to a proxy means test could considerably improve the targeting performance of Samurdhi and would significantly improve the poverty impact of the program. The analysis finds that the performance of the proposed proxy means test model suffers when the coefficients are estimated from samples smaller than 1,000 households. However, the analysis does not find a similar loss of model performance when the model is estimated from seasonal data, provided the sample size is sufficiently large. The proposed model could be applied to targeting a variety of safety net programs after validating and refining the model by conducting a pilot survey.

Suggested Citation

  • Sebastian,Ashwini Rekha & Shivakumaran,Shivapragasam & Silwal,Ani Rudra & Newhouse,David Locke & Walker,Thomas & Yoshida,Nobuo, 2018. "A Proxy Means Test for Sri Lanka," Policy Research Working Paper Series 8605, The World Bank.
    • Handle: RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:8605
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/911001539090001831/pdf/WPS8605.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Sánchez Ramos, Karen Melissa & Karimi, Abdul Matin, 2020. "Social protection in Sri Lanka: An analysis of the social, economic and political effectiveness of the Samurdhi program," MPRA Paper 102558, University Library of Munich, Germany.

    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:wbk:wbrwps:8605. 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.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using 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: Roula I. Yazigi (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/dvewbus.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.