Targeting poor students in Thailand with proxy means test

Proxy Means Test (PMT) is one of the most efficient ways to target the poor by measuring a wealth or poverty without using income, consumption or expenditure. Procedure of PMT is using household characteristic variables which have relation with income as a proxy for poverty. In this study, we created the PMT poverty scorecard to identify poor students in 10 provinces of Thailand, including Mae Hong Son, Nan, Nakhon Ratchasimi, Udon Thani, Nakhon Phanom, Chiang Rai, Trung, Kanchanaburi, Chanthaburi and Phuket, by using Least Squares Regression to estimate relationships between household characteristic variables and (log of) student’s average monthly household income per capita separately by province. The result indicated that PMT poverty targeting works well in terms of low undercoverage rate around 12 percent and high targeting accuracy rate in both poverty and total accuracy around 88 and 72 percent respectively. Therefore, we suggest using PMT as a main poverty targeting for any social welfare program in Thailand to transfer a targeted subsidy to those who are truly poor.