Analysis on Bandung Government Budget in Improvement of Human Resources Quality

Experts have long proposed using public services provision as a primary tool for improve the quality of human live in the developing world. Providing a proper basic education and health services to the community can help them to achieve a well living condition. In many developing countries, government becomes the main stakeholder of the provision these public services. Their policies in providing public services commonly reflected in their budget allocation. Therefore, the concern of government toward their citizen’s quality of life can be observed from their budget allocation. Using the major city of Bandung Indonesia as a case study, this research attempts to explore the condition on how far the government’s concern to improve its citizen. This research investigates the allocation of government budget on basic education and health spending. Using the data of government budget between 2005 to 2008 period, this research finds that the allocation of government budget on basic education and health services follows an increasing trend. However, compared to other similar cities the proportion of this allocation is still considered low. In addition, this research also finds that most of this budget is spent to finance routine expenditure instead of development expenditure. This condition is heavily influenced by the condition where the number of government officer is still considered large. And also low public control toward the use of government budget. The research also provides a number of recommendations to overcome several obstacles that inhibit bigger budget allocation to development expenditure in basic education and health services. The research suggests that the government should create a more efficient working system that can lead to reduction of current expenditure. In addition, since public control in government expenditure can address a better public expenditure allocation, the information of government budget should be disseminated widely to public. Therefore, the government should develop a system to increase transparency in government budget allocation.