Policy Briefs
Alternative Targeting Mechanisms for Social Safety Nets in Tunisia
No.
PB 94
Publisher
ERF
Date
September, 2022
In a nutshell
- Institutional weaknesses, poor coordination between different government services, and the increase in informality all make it difficult to identify low-income households using the current cash transfer program.
- The coverage rate of the poorest 10 percent using the Mixed Means Test (MMT) targeting model that combines individual and geographical scales is around 29 percent, nearly twice the coverage rate of the current National Program of Aid to Needy Families (PNAFN).
- The MMT works well not only at the national level, but also at the regional level. It allows us to minimize inclusion and exclusion errors for the poorest regions of Tunisia.
- The multidimensional approach based on household deprivation shows a clear divergence between the selection process of social program beneficiaries and the official identification of poor households in Tunisia.
- The proposed multidimensional approach identifies a higher number of beneficiaries compared to the selection process currently implemented in Tunisia. However, the inclusion of this number of households in a social program may be constrained by the unavailability of monetary resources and the country’s financial situation. For this purpose, the deprivation targeting approach allows us to categorize potential beneficiaries into three mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive groups of households according to their degree of deprivation.
Research Associates
Khaled Nasri
Researcher, Faculty of Economic Sciences and Management...
Research Fellows
Mohamed Amara
Associate Professor, Higher School of Economic and...
Research Associates
Imane Helmy
Senior Economist at World Bank’s Poverty and...