T

he Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab global research center, or J-PAL for short, plans to open its Southeast Asia office at the University of Indonesia (UI).

The office will focus on policy improvements to help governments reduce poverty and eradicate corruption in social assistance programs.

'€œOur main target is to support whatever programs a government wants to learn about or improve by evaluating the social assistance programs and testing the effectiveness of the anti-poverty programs run by each government,'€ the director and founder of J-PAL Abhijit Banerjee said on Tuesday.

Abhijit said that J-PAL specialized in random evaluation through which they could determine which development programs worked and which did not.

The center was established in India in 2003 and has opened four other offices in France, Chile, South Africa and the United States. The center consists of researchers who work on monitoring projects to reach the poor more effectively.

Abhijit said that the most effective way to involve the poor was to offer them assistance programs for their approval so that they have a sense of ownership of the process. He added that the poor would then participate more actively in eradicating corruption by privately reporting whenever there was something going wrong with a program.

Benjamin Olken, another director of J-PAL, said that corruption was difficult to measure and even more difficult to control. However, he and the J-PAL team had devised a method to measure corruption and had used it as an alternative for reducing corruption in Indonesian road building projects in 2003 and 2004.

'€œWe used two types of strategy, which encouraged community participation and increased the probability of government-centered audits,'€ Benjamin, who is a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said.

He added that they measured corruption by comparing J-PAL researchers'€™ estimations of project cost, including the quantity of materials used, estimates of material costs and wages paid during the project, to what the villagers reported.

'€œThe participation of the community in monitoring the budget doesn'€™t mean corruption can be totally reduced. However, the more active a community, the more they are aware of their responsibility to monitor the aid given to them,'€ he told The Jakarta Post.

Meanwhile, Rema Hanna, the scientific director of J-PAL and an associate professor of Public Policy from Harvard University, said that J-PAL worked with governments, non-governmental partners and academics in many of their projects.

'€œIn Indonesia we have collaborated with government bodies, such as the National Development Planning Agency, the Central Statistics Agency, the Social Affairs Agency, the National Team for the Acceleration of Poverty Reduction and many ministries in order to reduce poverty,'€ she said, adding that Indonesia had become a role model for alleviating poverty in many other countries.

She explained that J-PAL used randomized evaluations to determine whether a program had an impact and how large the impact was.

'€œWe conduct an evaluation, gain knowledge and aggregate it as feed back. For example, Raskin, or rice for the poor, is a program in which we collaborated with the government and for which we provided evaluation and recommendations,'€ she told the Post. (tam)