Person:
Özler, Berk
Author Name Variants
Fields of Specialization
Poverty and inequality,
Social Protection,
Gender,
Maternal and Child Health
Degrees
External Links
Departments
Development Research Group
Externally Hosted Work
Contact Information
Last updated
August 22, 2023
Biography
Berk Özler is a lead economist in the Development Research Group, Poverty Cluster. He received his B.Sc. in Mathematics from Bosphorous University in 1991, and his Ph.D in Economics from Cornell University in 2001. After working on poverty and inequality measurement, poverty mapping, and the 2006 World Development Report on Equity and Development earlier, he decided to combine his interests in cash transfer programs and HIV risks facing young women in Africa by designing a field experiment in Malawi. He has since been involved in a number of cluster-randomized field experiments. He is a co-founder of and a regular contributor to the Development Impact blog.
Publication Search Results
1 - 1 of 1
-
Publication
Poverty Alleviation through Geographic Targeting: How Much Does Disaggregation Help?
(World Bank, Washington, D.C., 2004-10)Using recently completed "poverty maps" for Cambodia, Ecuador, and Madagascar, the authors simulate the impact on poverty of transferring an exogenously given budget to geographically defined subgroups of the population according to their relative poverty status. They find large gains from targeting smaller administrative units, such as districts or villages. But these gains are still far from the poverty reduction that would be possible had the planners had access to information on household level income or consumption. The results suggest that a useful way forward might be to combine fine geographic targeting using a poverty map with within-community targeting mechanisms.