Publication: Government Expenditures on Education, Health, and Infrastructure : A Naive Look at Levels, Outcomes, and Efficiency
Date
2007-05
ISSN
Published
2007-05
Author(s)
Estache, Antonio
Gonzalez, Marianela
Trujillo, Lourdes
Abstract
All interested parties seem to agree
that it is important to be able to monitor public sector
performance at the sectoral level, but most current work
based on multi-country databases does not lend itself to
country-specific conclusions. This is due to a large extent
to major data limitations both on sectoral expenditures and
on sectoral outcomes. This paper discusses the related
issues and shows what we can do with the current data
inspite of the drastic limitations. The main conclusions of
the paper are that any efforts to assess country-specific
performances in relative terms are likely to be difficult in
view of the data problems. A rough sense of performance
across sectors can be estimated for groups of countries,
allowing some modest benchmarking exercises. These estimates
show that low-income countries generally lag significantly
behind higher-income countries. Efficiency has improved
during the 1990s in energy and education but has not
improved significantly in transport.
Citation
“Estache, Antonio; Gonzalez, Marianela; Trujillo, Lourdes. 2007. Government Expenditures on Education, Health, and Infrastructure : A Naive Look at Levels, Outcomes, and Efficiency. Policy Research Working Paper; No. 4219. © World Bank, Washington, DC. http://openknowledge.worldbank.org/entities/publication/321243d8-3c70-5001-adc4-a6ad6abee006 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
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