Benefits on the Margin : Observations on Marginal Benefit Incidence

Younger, Stephen D.

Washington, DC:World Bank

关键词: ACCOUNTING;    ARTICLE;    BENEFICIARIES;    BENEFICIARY;    BENEFIT INCIDENCE ANALYSIS;   

DOI  :  10.1093/wber/lhg009
RP-ID  :  77398

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

Benefit incidence analysis has become apopular tool over the past decade, especially forresearchers at the World Bank. Despite or perhaps because ofthe popularity of this method, recent research has pointedout many of its limitations. One of the most commoncriticisms of benefit incidence analysis is that itsdescription of average participation rates is notnecessarily useful in guiding marginal changes in publicspending policies. This article considers a variety ofmethods for analyzing the marginal benefit incidence ofpolicy changes. A key conceptual point is that despite thefact that the various methods measure marginal incidence,they do not measure the same thing nor are they intended todo so. There are many possible policy changes and thus manymargins of interest. Each method captures one of these andso is of interest for some analyses and inappropriate forothers. Empirically, the precision of the methods differssubstantially, with those relying on differenced data oraggregations of households yielding standard errors that arequite large relative to the estimated shares.