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In theory, the informational advantage of decentralizing the eligibility criteria for a federal antipoverty program could come at a large cost to the program's performance in reaching the poor nationally. Whether this happens in practice depends on the size of the local-income effect on the eligibility cutoffs. China's Di Bao program provides a case study. Poorer municipalities adopt systematically lower thresholds—roughly negating intercity differences in need for the program and generating considerable horizontal inequity, so that poor families in rich cities fare better. The income effect is not strong enough to undermine the program's overall poverty impact; other factors, including incomplete coverage of those eligible, appear to matter more.

Annelise Orleck, author of Storming Caesars Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty, is interviewed by her partner of 20 years, journalist Alexis Jetter.

A Decade of Federal Antipoverty Programs: Achievements, Failures, and Lessons presents papers on the war on poverty, dealing with its origins, its education, health, and income maintenance programs, and its community action, legal services, and antidiscrimination policies. The book discusses poverty and social policy in the 1960s and 1970s; the social and political context of the war on poverty; and a decade of policy developments in the income-maintenance system. The text also describes a decade of policy developments in improving education and training for low-income populations; a decade of

Policy-oriented discussions often assume that "better targeting" implies larger impacts on poverty or more cost-effective interventions for fighting poverty. The literature on the economics of targeting warns against that assumption, but evidence has been scarce and the lessons from the literature have often been ignored by practitioners. This paper shows that standard measures of targeting performance are uninformative or even deceptive about the impacts on poverty, and cost-effectiveness in reducing poverty, of a large cash transfer program in China. The results suggest that in program design and evaluation, it would be better to focus directly on the program's outcomes for poor people than to rely on prevailing measures of targeting.