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…
Laporan "Program PNPM Generasi Indonesia: Evaluasi Dampak Sementara" memberikan analisis sementara mengenai hasil dan dampak dari Program Nasional Pemberdayaan Masyarakat (PNPM) Generasi di Indonesia. PNPM Generasi adalah program pemerintah yang dirancang untuk meningkatkan kesejahteraan masyarakat, khususnya dalam sektor pendidikan dan kesehatan, dengan pendekatan berbasis komunitas.
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…
Should government service delivery be outsourced to the private sector? If so, how? We conduct the first randomized field experiment on these issues, spread across 572 Indonesian localities. We show that allowing for outsourcing the last mile of a subsidized food delivery program reduced operating costs without sacrificing quality. However, prices paid by citizens were lower only where we exoge…
Indonesia has made remarkable strides in key human development indicators over the past few decades. Primary school enrollment is close to universal for both boys and girls, and the child mortality rate has declined rapidly. Nevertheless, infant mortality, child malnutrition, maternal mortality, junior secondary school enrollment, and educational learning quality have all remained problematic i…
Many developing country governments determine eligibility for anti-poverty programs using censuses of household assets. Does this distort subsequent reporting of, or actual purchases of, those assets? We ran a nationwide experiment in Indonesia where, in randomly selected provinces, the government added questions on flat-screen televisions and cell-phone SIM cards to the targeting census admini…