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

Antonio Estache, Marianela González and Lourdes Trujillo ()

No 07/03, City University Economics Discussion Papers from Department of Economics, City University, London

Abstract: All interested parties seem to agree that it’s important to be able to monitor public-sector performance at the sectoral level, but most current work based on multicountries databases doesn’t 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 in spite of the drastic limitations. The main conclusion of the paper is 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 higher income countries significantly. However, efficiency has improved during the 1990s in energy and education but has not improved significantly in transport.

New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-pbe
Date: 2007-02
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Related works:
Working Paper: Government expenditures on education, health, and infrastructure: a naive look at levels, outcomes, and efficiency (2007)
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Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cty:dpaper:0703

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