Impact of Government Spending on Education and Health in Sri Lanka: A Provincial Level Analysis

K.S. Apsara Mendis and Masaru Ichihashi
Additional contact information
K.S. Apsara Mendis: Graduate School for International Development and Cooperation, Hiroshima University

No 4-8, IDEC DP2 Series from Hiroshima University, Graduate School for International Development and Cooperation (IDEC)

Abstract: This study examines the impact of government spending on educational and healthcare development outcomes at the provincial level in Sri Lanka with the objectives of (1) to investigate the impact of government expenditure on education in terms of the student failure rate at the provincial level; (2) to investigate the impact of government expenditure on health in terms of infant mortality rate at the provincial level; (3) investigate the performance of other provinces in terms of social outcomes compare with that of Western Province and recommends policy implications based on the results. Panel data analysis technique has been utilized for the data set of seven provinces2 of Sri Lanaka for the period of 1995 to 2011. The empirical results imply that government spending by provincial councils does have an effect on student failure rates and infant mortality rates. But with the presence of other regional factors the quality of government spending is questionable. These findings are confirmed by the previous research in this field such as Rajkumar and Swaroop (2008), Baldacci, et al. (2008). Moreover, the performance of provinces in education and health sectors are varied with reference to Western Province. To attain the goals of education and healthcare sectors, the sum of government spending is not always what matters, but the quality. Therefore the provincial councils should not depend entirely on increasing the allocation of budget to improve the outcomes. Implementing monitoring and evaluation systems would be advantageous in advancing the effectiveness and quality of provincial budget allocation.

Keywords: Government spending; Human Capital; Education; Health; GDP; Sri Lanka (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I15 I22 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 25 pages
Date: 2014-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-hea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://ir.lib.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/files/public/36179 ... 38/IDEC-DP2_04-8.pdf First version (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://ir.lib.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/files/public/36179/20141104054003610838/IDEC-DP2_04-8.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> http://ir.lib.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/files/public/3/36179/20141104054003610838/IDEC-DP2_04-8.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://ir.lib.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/files/public/3/36179/20141104054003610838/IDEC-DP2_04-8.pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hir:idecdp:4-8

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IDEC DP2 Series from Hiroshima University, Graduate School for International Development and Cooperation (IDEC) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Keisuke Kawata ().