As the Chilean government seeks to reduce both poverty and inequality through cash transfers to poor households, local governments are responsible for both identifying the poor and allocating transfers. Until recently, however, evaluating the effectiveness of local governments in enacting these...

By all accounts, poverty in Chile has declined dramatically over the last 20 years, with the national headcount ratio declining from nearly 40% in 1987 to below 14% in 2006. Due to data limitations, most research on poverty in Chile has focused on national and regional estimates, yet recent...