Publication: Health Public Expenditure Reviews: A How-To Guide
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2025-05-14
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2025-05-14
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The 2024 update also aligns with the World Bank’s renewed strategic priorities for Health, Nutrition, and Population, including the goal to support countries in delivering affordable, quality health services to 1.5 billion people by 2030 and the World Bank’s Human Capital Project. This 2024 guidance offers significant practical support for PER authors and other stakeholders. It is intended as a living document that will continue evolving as health sector shifts continue and even accelerate. For example, future updates might incorporate approaches to assessing public expenditure on pandemic preparedness. Additionally, it is crucial to consider how to strengthen the country's capacity to carry out public expenditure reviews on health. Public expenditure reviews (PERs) are among the World Bank’s core diagnostic tools and have a long tradition. 1996 the World Bank produced the first guidance and framework for public expenditure analyses (Pradhan 1996). A PER evaluates the effectiveness of government-wide expenditures in a country, their consistency with policy priorities, and their contributions to health outcomes. Although PERs generally, for example, the guidance draws on the Human Capital Project’s work, Investing in Human Capital for a Resilient Recovery: The Role of Public Finance. focus on public expenditures, they also include an analysis of private health expenditure. As such, a health PER examines the flow of funds within the health sector, the performance of the health system in ensuring and financing the provision of care and improving welfare, and specific aspects of sector performance by policy priorities.
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“World Bank. 2025. Health Public Expenditure Reviews: A How-To Guide. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/43188 License: CC BY-NC 3.0 IGO.”
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