Poverty Targeting in Asia: Experiences from India, Indonesia, the Philippines, People’s Republic of China and Thailand

Abstract

Poverty targeting, defined as the use of policy instruments to channel resources to a target group identified below an agreed national poverty line, is used by all governments in Asia in one form or another, either to ‘protect’ the poor from adverse shocks or ‘promote’ their long-run move out of poverty. Such measures typically include reaching the poor with credit, food, employment, access to health and other social facilities and occasionally cash transfers. The ADB Institute has conducted surveys of the experiences with poverty targeting in a number of large economies in South Asia (India), South East Asia (Thailand, Philippines and Indonesia) as well as in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). In some of these countries poverty targeting has a relatively lengthy history stemming from longstanding social welfare concerns (India and to some extent the Philippines and PRC), whilst elsewhere it originated principally in the late 1990’s in response to the impact of the regional Financial Crisis (Thailand and Indonesia).