Proxy Means Test (PMT) is one of the most efficient ways to target the poor. The procedure of PMT is using household characteristic variables, which have a relationship with income, as a proxy for poverty. PMT is a measurement of wealth, that is so to say poverty without using income, consumption, or expenditure. In this study, we created the PMT poverty scorecard to be used as a tool for targeting poor student in 10 provinces of Thailand, including Mae Hong Son, Nan, Nakhon Ratchasimi, Udon Thani, Nakhon Phanom, Chiang Rai, Trung, Kanchanaburi, Chanthaburi, and Phuket. We estimated the relationship between these household characteristic variables and students’ average monthly household income per capita using Ordinary Least Square (OLS) regression separately by the province to capture any geographical characteristic in each province. We then turned 11 household characteristic estimated coefficients into a PMT poverty scorecard for each province. Overall, the result suggests that PMT poverty targeting works well in 10 provinces of Thailand regarding low under coverage rate, high targeting accuracy rate in both poverty and total accuracy, except for Phuket, which has a huge leakage rate since its geographical characteristics are quite different compared to others. However, this leakage problem needs to be explored more as student maybe, in fact, actually poor as same as PMT poverty targeting suggested. For policy recommendation, we suggested using PMT as the main poverty targeting approach and an identification survey of students who have been targeted as poor to increase the efficiency of poverty targeting. Also, we suggested that adding household characteristic variables in the survey questionnaire could increase the efficiency of PMT poverty targeting in statistical terms.

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Paiboonsin, T. (2019). Targeting poor students with proxy means test. International Journal of Business and Administrative Studies, 5(3), 154-174. doi: https://dx.doi.org/10.20469/ijbas.5.10005-3