Moreon the Effectiveness of Public Spendingon Health Care and Education: A Covariance Structure Model

International Monetary Fund

No 2002/090, IMF Working Papers from International Monetary Fund

Abstract: Using data for a sample of developing and transition countries, this paper estimates the relationship between government spending on health care and education, and social indicators. Unlike previous studies, where social indicators are used as proxies for the unobservable health and education status of the population, this paper estimates a latent variable model. The findings suggest that public social spending is an important determinant of social indicators, particularly in the education sector. Overall, the latent variable approach was found to yield more adequate estimates of social production functions, with larger elasticities of social indicators with respect to income and spending on education than the traditional approach, providing stronger evidence that increases in public spending have a positive impact on social indicators. The study also finds that the millennium goal of universal primary education enrollment by 2015 could be achieved through an increase by one-third, on average, in education spending.

Keywords: WP; government spending; rate (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 32
Date: 2002-05-01
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/cat/longres.aspx?sk=15822 (application/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:imf:imfwpa:2002/090

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/pubs/ord_info.htm

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IMF Working Papers from International Monetary Fund International Monetary Fund, Washington, DC USA. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Akshay Modi ().