Abstract Food aid and antipoverty transfers are usually targeted towards poor or food-insecure households. However, the limited cost-effectiveness of aid targeting and its numerous collateral effects raise many ethical issues: many non-poor households receive the aid while a high percentage of poor or food-insecure households are not covered; the targeting cost sometimes absorbs a significant share of the available budget (thereby reducing the amount transferred); and targeting practices generate stigmatisation, social tensions and other negative effects within the population of potential recipients. These issues raise practical questions. Is it always relevant to target aid? When this is the case, which method(s) should be used? Answering these questions requires balancing all the positive and negative effects of targeting, which is complicated by the lack of a common metric to express its benefits in terms of channelling the aid to the poor and the collateral damages it generates (which are often non-monetary). To overcome this difficulty, the present article mobilises ethical theories. It builds on the extensive literature concerning the effects of targeting to provide an ethical assessment of targeting practices, distinguishing between classical methods and those relying on self-targeting. They are assessed both under consequentialist approaches based on welfare or capabilities and under Rawls’ Theory of justice. The implications for policies are far-reaching regarding (i) whether it is relevant to target, (ii) the method(s) to be used, (iii) how to decide and (iv) the potential relevance of alternative policies.
Franck Galtier (Wed,) studied this question.