Evaluation of Anti-poverty Programs’ Impact on Joint Disadvantages: Insights from the Philippine Experience

Anti-poverty programs increasingly target disadvantages in multiple outcomes to address current and future poverty. Conventional evaluation exercises, however, mostly estimate programs’ impacts separately. We present a framework, drawing from the counting approach, that captures the joint distribution of disadvantages and allows the evaluation of programs’ impacts on multiple disadvantages. We apply the framework to scrutinise the Philippine conditional cash transfer program using an embedded randomised control trial survey. Examining the program’s impact on the distribution of multiple disadvantages, we observe that the program successfully reduced multiple disadvantages overall, but did not necessarily benefit the families experiencing a higher number of disadvantages simultaneously. Our results exemplify the valuable contribution of considering the joint distribution of disadvantages in evaluating anti-poverty programs’ impacts.

Citation: Seth, S. and Tutor, M. J. (2019): ‘Evaluation of anti-poverty programs’ impact on joint disadvantages: Insights from the Philippine experience’ OPHI Working Paper 132, Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI), University of Oxford.

Also published in the Review of Income and Wealth, 2021, Vol. 67(4), pp. 977–1004.