The Eligibility-Adjusted Coverage Ratio (EACR): A Measurement Framework for Targeted Pension and Social Protection Schemes Evidence from India's Atal Pension Yojana

Coverage measurement for targeted social protection schemes is routinely mis-specified: evaluations benchmark enrolment against the full working-age or informal population rather than the sub-population actually eligible to enrol. This paper's core contribution is a general measurement principle: coverage should be benchmarked against the population a scheme is eligible to reach, not the population it happens to operate within. The paper operationalises that principle through the Eligibility-Adjusted Coverage Ratio (EACR), a generalised seven-step framework applicable to any targeted scheme where administrative enrolment data and survey-based age distributions are available. India's Atal Pension Yojana (APY) serves as the case study: applied to seven rounds of PLFS data using an eligible-share series derived from each year's published PLFS age-band sample distribution (48.7–50.8 percent, validated against a 42–58 percent stress-test range), the corrected ratio diverges from the conventional one by roughly ten to fifteen percentage points by 2023–24 — specification error, not a change in scheme performance. Supporting analysis shows the error varies systematically across states, compounds a documented gender enrolment gap, and recurs in an illustrative application to Thailand's National Savings Fund. The paper's lasting contribution is the correction itself: EACR is a low-cost measurement standard that, in principle, extends to any targeted scheme with an eligibility-defined population and available age-distribution data; the Thailand and PM-SYM applications reported here are scope checks on that claim rather than full independent validations, and are presented as such.

specification error, eligibility-adjusted coverage ratio, EACR framework

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