Indicator targeting in a political economy: Leakier can be better

作者：Jonah B. Gelbach, Lant H. Pritchett · 发表于：The Journal of Policy Reform · 年份：2001 · DOI：10.1080/13841280008523416 · 被引用次数：49 · 研究领域：Income, Poverty, and Inequality、Fiscal Policy and Economic Growth、Gender, Labor, and Family Dynamics

In LDCs, policymakers sometimes cannot observe income among the poor. One oft-proposed approach to redistribution is indicator targeting: targeting transfers on corrrelations between income and “indicators” like geography, gender, or occupation. We build a simple model in which maximizing poverty reduction from a fixed budget requires indicator targeting. Because insurance motives drive political support for redistribution, the budget depends on the degree of targeting. When middle income agents receive targeted transfers sufficiently rarely, introducing targeting reduces poor agents’ welfare. The converse holds when middle income agents receive targeted transfers sufficiently rarely, i.e. if the redis-tributive bucket is sufficiently leaky.