Poster #75 - Leaving Out the Elderly: Mistargeting in Bangladesh’s Old Age Allowance (OAA) Program

• In Event: Saturday Poster Luncheon

Abstract

The majority of the working population in Bangladesh is employed in the informal sector without a formal pension (ILO, 2024). The Old Age Allowance (OAA) program in Bangladesh is intended to ensure income security for the elderly, a group that is marginally more likely to be economically vulnerable than the national average once they have left the labor force (HelpAge International, 2020). Despite its intentions, the OAA suffers from significant mistargeting. Several strategies have been deployed to improve efficiency in targeting of program benefits. Prior research (Asri et al., 2024) examining the role of increasing government officials’ knowledge of selection criteria shows that this approach leads to minor improvements in targeting. Further, selection is often at the discretion of local political leaders because of Bangladesh’s decentralized structure of decisions over the allocation of public goods. This autonomy leads to the inclusion of politically-connected ineligible beneficiaries. Panda (2015) examines how being connected to local political leaders systematically distorts targeting and allocation of resources. Furthermore, Finan and Schechter (2012) argue that politicians may allocate benefits to reciprocal voters; voters who return the favor in terms of electoral support in exchange for material benefits. This study hypothesizes that political connections are a key predictor of mistargeting in the OAA program as measured by the ratio of non-eligible individuals receiving benefits to the total number of beneficiaries. Local government elections in Bangladesh are often subject to interference by the incumbent party and administrative officials. In such a setting, I thus hypothesize that reciprocity may not be an effective vote-buying strategy owing to a weaker sense of civic duty (Feitosa, 2020). To date, no study has examined the political economy of mistargeting of the OAA program in Bangladesh. The study aims to fill this gap by using data that is representative of rural Bangladesh, the 2018–2019 wave of the Bangladesh Integrated Household Survey (BIHS), to disentangle the roles of favoritism and reciprocity in OAA beneficiary selection. Findings from this study aim to reveal how political connections and vote-buying shape access to social safety nets for the elderly in rural Bangladesh.

Author

• Zaeem-Al Ehsan, Duke University
  Presenting Author