A Proxy Means Test for Sri Lanka

Sebastian, Ashwini ; Shivakumaran, Shivapragasam ; Silwal, Ani Rudra ; Newhouse, David ; Walker, Thomas ; Yoshida, Nobuo

World Bank, Washington, DC

关键词: POVERTY;    CONSUMPTION;    SAFETY NETS;    WELFARE;    TARGETING;   

DOI  :  10.1596/1813-9450-8605
RP-ID  :  WPS8605

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

This paper intends to inform the effortof the Sri Lankan government to reform the targetingefficacy of its social protection programs, in particular,Samurdhi, which currently distributes benefits based onself-reported income. The paper develops a proxy means testfor Sri Lanka based on the Household Income and ExpenditureSurvey 2016 and evaluates its performance for targetingbenefits of Samurdhi. The paper considers a range of modelsand policy parameters that could be applied depending ondata availability and country preferences. The resultsindicate that switching to a proxy means test couldconsiderably improve the targeting performance of Samurdhiand would significantly improve the poverty impact of theprogram. The analysis finds that the performance of theproposed proxy means test model suffers when thecoefficients are estimated from samples smaller than 1,000households. However, the analysis does not find a similarloss of model performance when the model is estimated fromseasonal data, provided the sample size is sufficientlylarge. The proposed model could be applied to targeting avariety of safety net programs after validating and refiningthe model by conducting a pilot survey.