Assessing the Poverty Impact of an Assigned Program

Some public programs are assigned more-or-less exclusively to certain observational units. These may be people, households, villages or larger geographic areas. The key thing is that some units get the program and some do not. This chapter reviews tools that can help assess the impacts of such a program, judged against its agreed objectives. The following are examples of the types of programs that can be assessed with the tools discussed in this chapter: • A social fund asks for proposals from community organizations, with preference for proposals from poor areas. Some areas do not apply, and some do, but are rejected. • A workfare program entails extra earnings for participating workers, and gains to the residents of the areas in which the work is done. Others receive nothing. • Infrastructure projects (road or water connections, for example) are targeted to areas that are both poor and poorly endowed in that infrastructure. Other areas do not participate. Notice that in each of these examples, there may be some indirect (or “second-round”) impacts on non-participants. A workfare program may lead to higher earnings for non-participants. Or a road improvement project in one area might improve accessibility elsewhere. Depending on how important these indirect effects are thought to be in the specific application, the “program” may need to be redefined to embrace the spillover effects. Or one might need to combine the type of evaluation discussed here with other tools, such as a model of the labor market to pick up other benefits. The following discussion will assume that the program is already in place, which makes this a case of ex-post impact assessment. That includes the evaluation of a pilot project, as an input to the exante assessment of whether the project should be scaled up. However, doing ex-post evaluations does not mean that the evaluation should start after the program finishes, or even after it begins. Indeed, the best ex-post evaluations are designed ex-ante — often side-by-side with the program itself. This can