Targeting of public policy: a debate on the methods of target population's evaluation

Abstract

We discuss in this paper statistical methods and their associated costs to them to identify the target population to social policies. We show that the choice of the statistical method to focus the social policy is quite important to guarantee a high degree of success of the policy. The paper discusses the operational problems, the type of costs and the possible errors in the identification of the target population. It presents a measure of efficiency of the targeting process applied to all methods.