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Government expenditures on education, health, and infrastructure : a naive look at levels, outcomes, and efficiency

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Author Info
Estache, Antonio
Gonzalez, Marianela
Trujillo,Lourdes

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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.

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Paper provided by The World Bank in its series Policy Research Working Paper Series with number 4219.

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Date of creation: 01 May 2007
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Handle: RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:4219

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Related research
Keywords: Transport Economics Policy&Planning; Public Sector Expenditure Analysis&Management; Inequality; Economic Theory&Research; Poverty Monitoring&Analysis;

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  5. Herrera, Santiago & Pang, Gaobo, 2005. "Efficiency of public spending in developing countries : an efficiency frontier approach," Policy Research Working Paper Series 3645, The World Bank. [Downloadable!]
  6. António Afonso & Miguel St. Aubyn, 2005. "Non-parametric approaches to education and health efficiency in OECD countries," Journal of Applied Economics, Universidad del CEMA, vol. 0, pages 227-246, November. [Downloadable!]
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  10. Battese, G E & Coelli, T J, 1995. "A Model for Technical Inefficiency Effects in a Stochastic Frontier Production Function for Panel Data," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 20(2), pages 325-32.
  11. Karras, Georgios, 1996. "The Optimal Government Size: Further International Evidence on the Productivity of Government Services," Economic Inquiry, Oxford University Press, vol. 34(2), pages 193-203, April.
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(explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)

  1. Rangan Gupta & Emmanuel Ziramba, 2008. "Optimal Public Policy with Endogenous Mortality," Working Papers 200829, University of Pretoria, Department of Economics. [Downloadable!]
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