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Proxy-Means Testing (PMT) and Community-Based Targeting (CBT) are among the most widely used methods for poverty targeting in low-income settings. This paper analyzes household data from nine programs implemented in the Sahel region using a harmonized approach to compare PMT and CBT selection as conducted in practice, once geographical targeting has been applied. The results show that the targeting performance measured depends critically on the definition of the targeting objectives, share of beneficiaries selected, and indexes used to evaluate targeting. While PMT performs better in reaching the poorest households based on per capita consumption, it differs little from CBT, or a random or universal allocation of benefits when distances to poverty lines are considered. When aiming to identify food insecure households, most PMT and CBT targeting schemes perform no better than a random allocation of benefits. On the other hand, targeting costs represent only a small share of budgets. Overall, the results emphasize the need to study programs as implemented in practice instead of relying on simulations of targeting performance, as widely used by practitioners and academics. Taken together, the findings suggest that while there may be a need to select households resulting from budget constraints, PMT and CBT contribute little to poverty or food insecurity reduction efforts in poor and homogeneous settings.

Session ID 4773, Paper# 19565

This paper investigates whether unconditional cash transfers can keep refugee children in school and out of work. We raise this question in the unique context of Turkey, which hosts the world's largest refugee population (including 3.6 million Syrians). Refugees in Turkey are supported by the world's largest cash transfer program for refugees, the Emergency Social Safety Net (ESSN). We exploit a program eligibility criterion to identify the causal impacts of the ESSN program using a regression discontinuity design. The results show a large effect on child labor and school enrollment among both male and female refugee children. Being a beneficiary household reduces the fraction of children working from 14.0 percent to 1.6 percent (a decrease of 88 percent) and the fraction of children aged 6-17 not in school from 36.2 to 13.7 percent (a reduction of 62 percent). By unpacking the mechanisms at play, we show that ESSN cash transfers become a significant part of a household's income, substantially alleviate extreme poverty, and reduce a family's need to resort to harmful coping strategies. Investigating the reasons for children not attending school, we find that the beneficiary households become more likely to send children to school because the cash transfer addresses both the opportunity cost and direct cost of schooling - although the former is more important. The findings have important implications for the design of policies aimed at supporting refugee children at scale.

Policy makers are increasingly interested in strategies to promote resilience and mitigate the effects of future climatic shocks. Cash transfer programs have had widely documented positive welfare impacts. They often also aim to offer protection against shocks, but their role in fostering resilience has been less studied. This paper assesses whether the beneficiaries of a multiyear government cash transfer program in rural Niger are better able to mitigate the welfare effects of drought shocks. It analyzes mechanisms through which cash transfers contribute to resilience, such as savings facilitation, asset accumulation, or income smoothing in agriculture and off-farm activities. It combines household survey data collected as part of a randomized control trial with satellite data used to identify exogenous rainfall shocks. The results show that cash transfers increase household consumption by about 10 percent on average. Importantly, this increase is mostly concentrated among households affected by drought shocks, for whom welfare impacts are larger than transfer amounts. Cash transfers increase savings. They also help households protect earnings in agriculture and off-farm businesses when shocks occur. Few differences in household durables or livestock are observed. Overall, these findings suggest that cash transfer programs targeting poor households can foster resilience by facilitating savings and income smoothing.

While risk is known to harm farmers’ production investments, there is still limited evidence of index-insurance impact on household ex-ante behavior. This paper studies a pilot area-yield index insurance project sold to cotton farmer groups in Burkina Faso. Insurance sales were randomized, and in the treatment area, an encouragement design was generated by providing premium subsidies (between 25% and 75%) randomly distributed to farmer groups. No impact was found on cotton production, most likely in reason of the late sale period (during the sowing period). However, substantial and significant impacts were found on several activities and assets such as field investments, sesame cultivation and livestock herding. The mechanisms behind these indirect effects are discussed. Overall, the findings suggest a promising role of index insurance for stimulating ex-ante investments, but also draws attention on implementation gaps which currently threaten this type of intervention.

This paper assesses the ex-post performance of two popular targeting mechanisms, Proxy Means Testing (PMT) and Community-Based Targeting (CBT), in a pilot cash transfer program in Cameroon. CBT is found to perform poorly in terms of selecting households with low per capita consumption when compared to PMT. CBT appears to select households with low physical and human capital, regardless of actual consumption level and shows more variability in the selection decision than PMT. The results suggest caution is needed in employing CBT methods to select households with low per capita consumption in an environment with high poverty rates and limited administrative capacity.

This dissertation focuses on identifying the poor in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and the potential of social assistance programs to address their condition. Each essay is related to one particular key step of the poverty alleviation agenda: poverty definition and measurement in Zimbabwe; targeting poor households in Cameroon; and impact evaluation of anti-poverty interventions in Niger. The first essay explores changes in poverty across multiple dimensions in a period of dramatic economic crisis and recovery in Zimbabwe. The essay analyzes changes in household well-being between 2001, 2007 and 2011/12, using an Alkire-Foster multidimensional poverty index. Results indicate a large increase in multidimensional poverty across between 2001 and 2007, followed by a (smaller) decrease in poverty between 2007 and 2011/12 (recovery period after the hyperinflation peak in 2008). However, decomposition of the index shows significantly different trends in poverty dimensions over time, as for instance health related dimensions continued to deteriorate after 2007. The second essay contributes to the policy debate on targeting by studying the ex-post efficiency of two targeting mechanisms employed in a cash transfer project in rural Cameroon: Proxy Means Testing (PMT) and community targeting. Results show a poor performance of community targeting in selecting households with low per capita consumption, compared to PMT targeting—whose errors remain high nonetheless. Communities tend to select small, isolated households with low physical and human capital, regardless of their actual consumption level, but produce variable outcomes. Overall results suggest that a higher coverage contributes to reducing targeting errors, and that better guidance should be provided to communities if the policy objective is to select low per capita consumption individuals. The third essay investigate whether cash transfers induce investments in assets and productive activities that survive the termination of program payments using data from an unconditional cash transfer project in Niger 18 months after its termination. Based on quasi-experimental methods, results indicate that local saving/credit systems (tontines) participation and livestock ownership significantly increased among project participants. There is also evidence of improvement in private assets, micro-enterprises and agriculture. The findings imply that cash transfer programs can have long-term sustainable impacts in rural SSA. Ph. D.

Cash transfers programs are an increasingly popular tool to alleviate poverty by raising households’ consumption and well-being. However, the sustainability of the short-term improvement induced by the transfers is still an open question in Sub-Saharan Africa. By studying a cash transfer project in rural Niger 18 months after its termination, this article investigates whether transfers induce investments in assets and productive activities that result in improvements in wellbeing that survive the termination of program payments. Results indicate that livestock asset and local credit (tontines) participation significantly increase among project participants. There is also evidence of improvement in private assets, living standards, micro-enterprises and agriculture. The findings imply that cash transfer programs can have long-term sustainable impacts even in extremely, poor rural areas.

Dünyanın belirli bölgelerinde, kadınların işgücüne katılım oranları hala düşük olması ve hatta düşmeye devam etmesi bu büyük sorunun göstergelerinden biridir. Ve Avrupayla Asya'nın kesiştiği noktada, Türkiye, bundan muaf görünmemektedir. Hızlı ekonomik büyümesine ve kadınların eğitimi, evlilik yaşı ve doğurganlık oranlarında gözle görülür iyileşmelere rağmen, ülkedeki kadınların iş gücüne katılımı hala düşüktür. Bu tez, bu olguyu çarpıcı Türkiye örneğinde deşifre etmeye yardımcı olmayı amaçlamaktadır.Türkiye'de kadınların iş gücüne katılımı oranının düşüklüğünün arkasındaki nedenleri belirlemek için çok sayıda çalışma yapılmıştır. Ancak bu tez, ülkenin kadın nüfusunun özellikle `ne istihdamda, ne eğitimde, ne de mesleki eğitimde` oluşuna odaklanan ilk örnektir. Bazı kadınların, Herhangi bir örgün eğitimin veya mesleki eğitimin dışında kalarak neden ülkenin, diğer türlü güçlü işgücünden uzak durduğunu araştırmaktadır. Her grup için spesifik faktörleri belirlemek ve farklı yaş gruplarına yönelik regresyon analizlerini içermektedir.Bunu yaparken, analizimde Türkiye İstatistik Kurumu (TÜİK) tarafından yapılan 2016 yılındaki hane halkı işgücü anketi mikro veri setini kullandım..Analizde, Türkiye'deki düşük kadın iş gücü katılımının arkasındaki nedenleri araştırmak için logit modelleri kullandım. Sonuçlar, kadın olmanın ne eğitimde ne de mesleki eğitimde olmayan bir birey olma ihtimalini arttırdığını göstermiştir. Ayrıca ne eğitimde ne de mesleki eğitimde olmayan bir birey olma olasılığının, çeşitli değişkenlerin kontrolünden sonra daha da yüksek olduğunu buldum. Beklendiği üzere, sonuçlar ne eğitimde ne de mesleki eğitimde olmayan bir birey olma ihtimalini azaltmada eğitimin çok önemli bir rol oynadığını kanıtlamıştır. Kadınların resmi bir işte çalıştırılma ihtimalini arttırdığından, özellikle yüksek öğrenimin önemli olduğu görülmektedir. Ayrıca, evli kadınların ne eğitimde ne de mesleki eğitimde olmayan bir birey olma ihtimali bekar kadınlardan daha fazladır. Female labor force participation rates that remain still low and even sagging in certain regions around the world are but one indication of this huge problem. And Turkey, at the intersection of Europe and Asia, appears hardly immune to it. Despite its rapid economic growth and notable improvements to women's education, age of marriage and fertility rates, the country is still characterized by a low FLFP. The thesis at hand aims to help decipher this phenomenon in the striking case of Turkey. This thesis is the first of its sort that focuses specifically on the country's female population 'not in employment, nor in education, nor in training.' It explores why some women remain out of the nation's otherwise strong labor force although they are not following any formal education or professional training either. It contains regression analyses run for different age groups in order to identify specific factors for each group. I have used in my analysis a micro data set of the household labor force survey of 2016 conducted by the Turkish Statistical Institute (TurkStat). The results have showed that being female increases the odds of being NEET, I have also found that the probability of being NEET is even higher after controlling for various covariates.. As expected, the results have proved that education plays a crucial role in decreasing the odds of being NEET. It appears particularly to be the case with higher education since it increases the probability of women being employed in a formal job. Additionally, married women are more likely to be NEET than single women. 75

Nakit transferi programlarının etkinliğine olan inancın artmasıyla beraber hem bu tür projelerin sayısında hem de etkilerini inceleyen çalışmalarda bir artış görülmektedir. Bu tezin konusu da 2013 yılında Kamerun'un en kuzey noktasında, Kamerun hükümeti ve Dünya Bankası işbirliği ile başlatılan pilot koşulsuz nakit transferi programıdır. Bu tez kapsamında, faydalanıcı ailelere sağlanan bu nakit transferinin, hane içindeki çocukların eğitimine ve bu hanelerdeki çocuk işçiliğine olan etkisi incelenmiştir. Araştırmanın sonuçları, hane halklarına koşulsuz bir şekilde sağlanan nakit transferlerinin bu hanelerde okula giden çocuk sayısında bir artış, okulu bırakan çocuk sayısında bir azalış ve hane halklarının eğitim harcamalarında bir artış sağlarken; çalışan çocuk sayısında da bir artışa sebep olduğunu göstermektedir. Özetle, bu çalışma çocuk eğitimi ve çocuk işçiliği kavramlarının ikame değil aksine tamamlayıcı bir özellik gösterdiğini ortaya koymaktadır. Concordantly with increasing belief in the effectiveness of cash transfer programs, there is an increase both in the number of such projects and in studies examining their impacts. The subject of this thesis is pilot unconditional cash transfer project implemented in 2013 with the cooperation of Cameroon government and World Bank in the far north of Cameroon. In this thesis, the effect of cash transfer on child education and child labor for children those living on beneficiary households are examined. The results of the study provides that unconditional cash transfer have an impact on increasing in the number of children going to school, on decreasing in the number of children dropping out of the school and households' total expenditure for education while on increasing in the number of working children. In summary, this study provides that the concepts of child education and child labor are complementary rather than substitute. 86

Bu çalışma, Afrika'da yaygın olarak kullanılan iki hedefleme mekanizmasını karşılaştırmaktadır; temsili ortalama testi (PMT) ve topluluk temelli hedefleme (CBT). İki yöntemin performans karşılaştırması yeni yoksulluk kriterleri seti ile genişletilmiştir. Bunlar sağlık ve beslenmedir. İlk olarak, kişi başına düşen hane halkı tüketimi ana refah ölçüsü olarak kullanılmıştır. Ardından, hanehalkı anketine dayanarak hane sağlığı endeksi oluşturulmuştur. Hanehalkı refah düzeyini belirlemek için bu endeks kullanılmıştır. Son olarak, beslenme puanı refah metriği olarak kullanılmıştır. Bu amaçla, hane halkı beslenme çeşitliliği skoru 12 besin grubu üzerinden hesaplanmıştır. Sonuçlar, PMT'nin tüketim refahı metriklerinde daha iyi performans göstermesine karşın, CBT'nin sağlık ve beslenme refahı metriklerinden daha iyi performans görüldüğünü göstermiştir. Bu sonuçlar, toplumun yoksulluk algısının PMT formülü gibi yalnızca tüketime dayanmadığını göstermiştir. This study compares two targeting mechanisms commonly used in Africa; proxy mean test (PMT) and community- based targeting (CBT). The performance comparison of the two methods is extended through a new set of poverty criteria: health and nutrition. First, consumption per capita household was used as the main welfare metric. Then, household health index was created based on the household survey. This index was used the determine household welfare level. Lastly, nutrition score was used as a welfare metric. For this purpose, household dietary diversity score (HDDS) was calculated based on 12 food group. Results showed that while PMT outperforms on consumption welfare metric, CBT outperforms on health and nutrition welfare metric. These indicated that poverty perception of the community doesn't solely base on the consumption like PMT formula. 79

Bu tez çalışmasında, Avrupa Yaşam Kalitesi anketinin veri setini kullanarak, iyi oluşun objektif ve öznel olmak üzere 2011 yılında Türkiye için iki yönünü inceledik. Kardinal ve sıralı modelleme yaklaşımlarını tartıştıktan sonra, genelleştirilmiş sıralı lojistik regresyon modellemesi ile bulduğumuz sonuç, Türkiye'de objektif iyi oluş kriterlerindeki iyileşmenin, öznel iyi oluş kriterlerine aynı yönde yansıma yaptığıdır. Duygusal iyi oluş kriterleri de çalışmada elde edilen sonuçları destekler yönde katkı sağlamıştır ve Türkiye iyi oluş çalışmalarında kullanılması önerilmektedir. Yalnızca parasal yoksunluklar üzerinden yapılan değerlendirmeler, öznelliği yadsıyacağı için kapsamlı sonuçlar sağlayamayacağından, bu çalışmalarından hareketle, objektif ve öznel iyi oluşun birlikte ölçümlenmesi ve değerlendirilmesini politika yapıcılara önermekteyiz. In this thesis, we investigate the association between two aspects of well-being in Turkey: objective and subjective. By employing the third European Quality of Life Survey for 2011, we assessed the generalized ordered logistic regression in which we conclude that if an improvement occurs in objective well-being components, subjective well-being is getting improved as well. Mental well-being is another indispensable well-being component which should be employed in well-being studies. Focusing on monetary measures of well-being is limited because of ignoring the subjectivity. Then we recommend the combined application of objective and subjective well-being as it provides promising and valuable insights. 113