Public Spending and Outcomes: Does Governance Matter?

By A. Rajkumar, V. Swaroop. 2002

920 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The authors examine the role of governance-measured by level of corruption and quality of bureaucracy-and ask how it affects the relationship between public spending and outcomes. Their main innovation is to see if differences in efficacy of public spending can be explained by quality of governance. The authors find that public health spending lowers child and infant mortality rates in countries with good governance. The results also indicate that as countries improve their governance, public spending on primary education becomes effective in increasing primary education attainment. These findings have important implications for enhancing the development effectiveness of public spending. The lessons are particularly relevant for developing countries, where public spending on education and health is relatively low, and the state of governance is often poor.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/aeba3e8b7b99a8e4892bed9148e680036a9dffa8

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Citations in the corpus

Measuring and explaining government efficiency in developing countries (2007, background): “…better results in these areas, as evidenced by several cross-country studies (Musgrove, 1996; Mingat and Tan, 1998; Filmer and Pritchett, 1999; Rajkumar and Swaroop, 2002; World Bank, 2003a).2 In this paper, we measure government expenditure efficiency in a number of low and lower middle…”
Public Investment in Developing Countries: A Blessing or a Curse? (2008, background): “For example, Rajkumar and Swaroop (2008) study the effect of public”
Reducing Child Undernutrition: Past Drivers and Priorities for the Post-MDG Era (2014, background): “They have also been employed in studies of the relationship between governance, public spending, and child health outcomes (Hu & Mendoza, 2013; Rajkumar & Swaroop, 2008).”
Corruption and growth: The role of governance, public spending, and economic development (2014, background): “7 For example, Mauro (1998), Delavallade (2006), Kagundu (2006), Devarajan et al. (1996), Keefer and Knack (2002), Gupta et al. (2001), Rajkumar and Swaroop (2008), and de la Croix and Delavallade (2009) have shown that corruption distorts the effectiveness of public spending.”