How Expansion of Public Services Affects the Poor: Benefit Incidence Analysis for the Lao People’s Democratic Republic

Peter Warr, Jayant Menon () and Sitthiroth Rasphone
Additional contact information
Sitthiroth Rasphone: Australian National University

No 349, ADB Economics Working Paper Series from Asian Development Bank

Abstract: Studies of the incidence of benefits from public services have rightly stressed the difference between average and marginal benefits. Cross sectional methods of analysis for Lao PDR indicate that for public education and health services, total benefits are highest for the best-off quintile groups. Nevertheless, these groups’ shares of marginal benefits are generally considerably lower and the marginal benefit shares of poorer quintile groups are correspondingly higher. For primary and secondary education and for primary health centers, expanding the overall level of provision delivers a pattern of marginal benefits that is significantly more pro-poor than average shares indicate. Although panel estimates show a pattern of marginal benefits that is somewhat less pro-poor than cross-sectional results suggest, they do not change the finding that the pattern of marginal benefits is more pro-poor than the overall pattern of average benefits.

Keywords: benefit incidence analysis; average benefit; marginal benefit; health services; education services; Lao PDR (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D12 E21 H31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 24 pages
Date: 2013-07-19
Note: http://www.adb.org/sites/default/files/pub/2013/ewp-349.pdf
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.adb.org/publications/how-expansion-pub ... nce-analysis-lao-pdr Full text (text/html)

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:ris:adbewp:0349

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ADB Economics Working Paper Series from Asian Development Bank 6 ADB Avenue, Mandaluyong City, 1550 Metro Manila, Philippines. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Orlee Velarde ().