Who should be served first? Multidimensional prioritization in a Bolivian cash transfer program

Journal article

Social protection programs in developing countries often rely on broad eligibility criteria that overlook the heterogeneity of beneficiaries’ deprivation profiles. We propose an ex-ante microsimulation framework to evaluate the efficiency of conditional cash transfer (CCT) allocation rules in reducing multidimensional poverty. Applied to Bolivia’s flagship CCT, Bono Juancito Pinto, using 2022 household survey data, we compare the current, uniform allocation rule against counterfactual prioritarian rules that concentrate resources first on households with the highest burden of overlapping deprivations. BJP has the explicit aim to reduce poverty in the long run, and we show that while it is generally effective, its impact can be considerably amplified under prioritarian rules. This efficiency is driven by a poverty reduction mechanism that resolves program targeted outcomes among the most deprived and may pull some of these households out of multidimensional poverty. While our framework takes the program’s eligibility criteria and associated exclusion errors as given, we demonstrate that a multidimensional lens for resource allocation can mitigate the fiscal inefficiencies of inclusion errors.

Authors: Rios, G; Nogales, R

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Elsevier
• Journal: World Development
• Volume: 204
• Article number: 107434
• Publication date: 2026-04-22
• Acceptance date: 2026-04-12
• DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2026.107434
• EISSN: 1873-5991
• ISSN: 0305-750X
• Language: English
• Keywords: multidimensional poverty; social protection; CCT allocation rules; Bolivia