Human Capital Expenditure and Its Effectiveness on Multi-Program Coverage: A Policy Prioritization Investigation

Omar A. Guerrero, Daniele Guariso, Gonzalo Castañeda and Michael Weber

No 11425, Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank

Abstract: This paper uses artificial intelligence-enhanced agent computing to determine how to allocate budgetary resources within a large set of heterogeneous government programs targeting human capital. The approach considers essential features of the budget allocation process: multidimensionality, interdependencies between policy issues, and the political economy of public officials' collective action. The analysis uses highly disaggregated Mexican data covering the 2016-2022 period across 49 federal government human capital programs. It focuses on how expenditure affects program coverage, defined as the share of the population with a public problem and that has access to various government benefits to mitigate those problems, in the short run. The paper answers three research questions. First, how sensitive is program coverage to changes in public expenditure? Second, what are the structural bottlenecks behind poor coverage response? Third, what are the optimal budgetary allocations that could boost the performance of a multidimensional objective function?

Date: 2026-07-01
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/0997192 ... 91b-fa988c9c2f98.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden

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:wbk:wbrwps:11425

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank 1818 H Street, N.W., Washington, DC 20433. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Roula I. Yazigi ().