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April 2000 - Community-level targeting of antipoverty programs is now common. Do local community organizations target the poor better than the central government? In one program in Bangladesh, the answer tends to be yes, but performance varies from village to village. The authors try to explain why. It is common for central governments to delegate authority over the targeting of welfare programs to local community organizations - which may be better informed about who is poor, though possibly less accountable for getting the money to the local poor - while the center retains control over how much goes to each local region. Galasso and Ravallion outline a theoretical model of the interconnected behavior of the various actors in such a setting. The model's information structure provides scope for econometric identification. Applying data for a specific program in Bangladesh, they find that overall targeting was mildly pro-poor, mostly because of successful targeting within villages. But this varied across villages. Although some village characteristics promoted better targeting, these were generally not the same characteristics that attracted resources from the center. Galasso and Ravallion observe that the center's desire for broad geographic coverage appears to have severely constrained the scope for pro-poor village targeting. However, poor villages tended not to be better at reaching their poor. They find some evidence that local institutions matter. The presence of cooperatives for farmers and the landless appears to be associated with more pro-poor program targeting. The presence of recreational clubs has the opposite effect. Sometimes the benefits of decentralized social programs are captured by local elites, depending on the type of spending being decentralized. When public spending is on a private (excludable) good, and there is no self-targeting mechanism to ensure that only the poor participate, there is ample scope for local mistargeting. This paper - a product of Poverty and Human Resources, Development Research Group - is part of a larger effort in the group to assess the performance of alternative means of reaching the poor through public programs. The study was funded by the Bank's Research Support Budget under the research project Policies for Poor Areas (RPO 681-39). The authors may be contacted at egalasso@worldbank.org or mravallion@worldbank.org.

Anti-Poverty --- Community Groups --- Community Organizations --- Conflict --- Food-For-Education --- Income --- Irrigation --- Land Inequality --- Local Farmers --- Local Irrigation Facility --- Participatory Poverty Assessments --- Poor --- Poor Families --- Poor Farmers --- Poor Households --- Poverty Programs --- Poverty Reduction --- Public Spending --- Rural --- Rural Development --- Rural Families --- Rural Poverty Reduction --- Services and Transfers to Poor --- Targeting

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Beginning to End Hunger presents the story of Belo Horizonte, home to 2.5 million people and the site of one of the world's most successful food security programs. Since its Municipal Secretariat of Food and Nutritional Security was founded in 1993, Belo Horizonte has sharply reduced malnutrition, leading it to serve as an inspiration for Brazil's renowned Zero Hunger programs. The secretariat's work with local family farmers shows how food security, rural livelihoods, and healthy ecosystems can be supported together. In this convincing case study, M. Jahi Chappell establishes the importance of holistic approaches to food security, suggests how to design successful policies to end hunger, and lays out strategies for enacting policy change. With these tools, we can take the next steps toward achieving similar reductions in hunger and food insecurity elsewhere in the developed and developing worlds. Learn more about Jahi and his work on his personal website.

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