Public Social Spending in Africa: Do the Poor Benefit?

Public spending on health care in Africa: do the poor benefit?

Health care is a basic service essential in any effort to combat poverty, and is often subsidized with public funds to help achieve that aim. This paper examines public spending on curative health care in several African countries and finds that this spending favours mostly the better-off rather than the poor. It concludes that this targeting problem cannot be solved simply by adjusting the sub...

Gender and Public Spending: Insights from Benefit Incidence

This paper reviews the value added to benefit incidence analysis of public spending when results are disaggregated by gender, looking at education spending in Côte d’Ivoire (1995) and health care access in Ghana (1992). In Côte d’Ivoire the low incidence of benefits to poor households was due partly to high spending on tertiary education, which poor households do not access, but also to decisio...

Inequality of Health Spending and Public Health Outcome in Countries of the WHO’s Eastern Mediterranean Regional Office (EMRO)

Introduction: There are little attention about health spending and public health outcomes especially in the WHO’s Eastern Mediterranean Region. This  paper  presents  an  overview  on  health  spending  and  public health  outcomes  in the WHO Eastern Mediterranean countries during 1995-2011. Methods: This study conducted in 2013 use of health expenditure...

Public works and social protection in sub-Saharan Africa Do public works work for the poor?

Marginal benefit incidence of public health spending: evidence from Indonesian sub-national data.

We examine the marginal effects of decentralized public health spending by incorporating estimates of behavioural responses to changes in health spending in benefit incidence analysis. The analysis is based on a panel dataset of 207 Indonesian districts over the period from 2001 to 2004. We show that district public health spending is largely driven by central government transfers, with an elas...