What is the big idea? The danger of a low-bar poverty line and measurement of poverty with periodic household surveys is that one completely misses the dynamics of household’s income and consumption. One can create the illusion there is a group called “the poor” in the way there is a group called “left handed”–that is, they have the condition of being poor as a relatively stable state. But it is equally empirically plausible that with high volatility of income (and low savings) there is high volatility of consumption and hence lots of people move in and out of “poverty” due to positive and negative income shocks. This idea of vulnerability to poverty means there are different ways of thinking about “social protection.” One is attempting to identify and make transfers to the chronically poor (those below an absolute threshold), the metaphor of a “safety net.” The other is to identify people who have experienced negative shocks to their income and make transfers to the “shocked”–which is of course the essence of insurance. These different metaphors have very different implications for the politics and the design of social protection schemes.
“Quantifying Vulnerability to Poverty: A Proposed Measure, with Application to Indonesia.” SMERU Working Paper (with Asep Suryahadi and Sudarno Sumarto).
“Safety Nets and Safety Ropes: Comparing the Dynamic Benefit Incidence of Two Indonesian ‘JPS’ Programs.” SMERU Working Paper (with Sudarno Sumarto and Asep Suryahadi).
“A National Snapshot of the Social Impact of Indonesia’s Crisis.” Bulletin of Indonesian Studies, December 1999. (with Anna Wetterberg and Sudarno Sumarto)
“Indicator Targeting in a Political Economy: Leakier Can Be Better.” Journal of Policy Reform vol.4, no.2, 2000. (with Jonah Gelbach).
“Is More for the Poor is Less for the Poor?: The Politics of Means-tested Targeting.” The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis and Policy, 2002. (with Jonah Gelbach).
“The Political Economy of Targeted Safety Nets.” World Bank Social Protection Unit Discussion Paper Series, 2005.
Moving Out of Poverty: Success From the Bottom Up. Palgrave/Macmillan for the World Bank, 2009. (with Deepa Narayan and Soumya Kapoor).