Governments seeking to provide food assistance have a choice between providing in-kind food directly to beneficiaries, or providing vouchers that can be used to purchase food on the market. To understand the differences between these policies, the Government of Indonesia randomly phased in the transition from in-kind delivery of subsidized rice to approximately equivalent vouchers usable to buy…
This paper decomposes changes in poverty into growth and redistribution components, and employs several pro-poor growth concepts and indices to explore the growth, poverty and inequality nexus in Indonesia over the period 2002-2012. We find a ‘trickle-down’ situation, which the poor have received proportionately less benefits from growth than the non-poor. All pro-poor measures suggest that…
In spite of sustained economic growth and progress in poverty reduction, the status of child nutrition in Indonesia is abysmal, with chronic malnutrition rates continuing to remain at very high levels. In this backdrop, this study attempts to shed light on the channels through which various socioeconomic risk factors affect children’s nutritional status in Indonesia. We investigated the impac…
Governments seeking to provide food assistance have a choice between providing in-kind food directly to beneficiaries, or providing vouchers that can be used to purchase food on the market. To understand the differences between these policies, the Government of Indonesia randomly phased in the transition from in-kind delivery of subsidized rice to approximately equivalent vouchers usable to buy…
Can governments improve aid programs by providing information to beneficiaries? In our model, information can change how much aid citizens receive as they bargain with local officials who implement national programs. In a large-scale field experiment, we test whether mailing cards with program information to beneficiaries increases their subsidy from a subsidized rice program. Beneficiaries rec…
In this paper we investigate how the receipt of educational transfers, scholarships and related assistance programmes affects the labour supply of children and the marginal spending behaviour of households on children’s educational goods. We use a nationally representative household survey of unusual scope and richness from Indonesia. We found strong evidence of educational cash transfers and…
Over the two decades to 2019, a decentralised Indonesia has made significant progress in reducing the poverty rate by more than 50 percent. Despite a significant decline at the national level, progress in poverty reduction has been uneven across districts. This study aims to investigate those factors that may explain these regional variations using panel regressions. Using district panel data s…
Centralised targeting registries are increasingly used to allocate social assistance benefits in developing countries. This paper provides the first attempt to identify the relative importance of two key design issues for targeting accuracy: (1) which households to survey for inclusion in the targeting registry and (2) how to rank surveyed households. We evaluate the performance of Indonesia’…
This paper presents one of the first randomized evaluations of collective pay-for-performance payments for ecosystem services. We test whether community-level fiscal incentives can curtail the use of land-clearing fire, a major source of emissions and negative health externalities. The program was implemented over the 2018 fire season in Indonesia with three parts: (a) awareness raising and…
To assess ways to achieve widespread, financially sustainable health insurance coverage in developing countries, we designed a randomised experiment involving almost 6,000 households in Indonesia who are subject to a nationally mandated government health insurance program (Jaminan Kesehatan Nasional: JKN). We assessed several interventions that simple theory and prior evidence suggest could inc…