Government Expenditures on Education, Health, and Infrastructure : A Naive Look at Levels, Outcomes, and Efficiency

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.