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Publications & Knowledge

  •  

    SectorDescription/highlightsLink
    EducationEducation Public Expenditure Review Guidelines (World Bank 2017) - This PER guideline contains the Checklist to conduct a PER in education and analytical techniques complemented by country examples.
    InfrastructureThe InfraSAP2.0 is an extended core diagnostic of the World Bank developed by the Infrastructure Vice-Presidency to provide a comprehensive and consistent approach to evaluating the  infrastructure situation in a country. It aims to identify investment gaps and policy shortfalls, as well as identifying opportunities for private sector participation. The diagnostic is organized in three pillars: connectivity, finance, and governance.
    Water and sanitationPublic Expenditure Review from the Perspective of the Water and Sanitation Sector (World Bank 2012) - The objective of this guidance note: public expenditure review from the perspective of the water supply and sanitation sector is to provide World Bank staff with a body of knowledge and good practice guidelines to help them evaluate the allocation of public resources to water and sanitation services in a consistent manner and to increase their knowledge of public expenditure issues in the sector
    Security and criminal JusticeSecuring Development ¨C Public Finance and the Security Sector (World Bank 2017) This book highlights the role played by public finance in the delivery of security and criminal justice services. It seeks to strengthen policy and operational dialogue on security sector issues by providing national and international stakeholders with key information on security expenditure policy and management
    Agriculture Practitioners¡¯ Toolkit for Agriculture Public Expenditure Analysis (World Bank, 2011) - This toolkit for analyzing public expenditures in agriculture contributes to a broader effort to enhance the focus, quality, and appropriate scaling of public spending in the sector. More specifically, the toolkit has two goals: to provide checklists for practitioners conducting various kinds of agriculture public expenditure analyses, and to provide selected examples on aspects of the checklist to help guide analysis
    Climate ChangeClimate Change PEIR Sourcebook- This Climate Change PEIR Sourcebook (CCPEIR) seeks to provide practitioners with the tools and information needed to respond to the public expenditure policy and management challenges arising from climate change. It is a series of notes and supporting materials written to consolidate current research and international experience, to identify emerging practice, and to provide practical and applicable guidance for staff of central finance agencies, development agencies, environmental agencies, and international organizations working on climate change issues. 
    Social protectionGuidance for the conduct of a social protection expenditure, performance and finance review - The aim of this paper is to provide some guidance on how to carry out a social protection (SP) expenditure, performance and finance review - given the absence of social protection in public expenditure review (PER) work to date. Such a review will enable countries (i) to better use their SP budgets as a proactive instrument in addressing vulnerability and welfare concerns, and (ii) to propose solutions that ultimately aim at reducing poverty and maximizing social welfare.
    CPATThe Carbon Pricing Assessment Tool (CPAT) is a spreadsheet-based tool to support rapid estimation of effects of carbon pricing and fossil fuel subsidy reforms along several economic and non- economic dimensions, including key macroeconomic variables, energy consumption, local and global pollutants, ¡®development co-benefits¡¯, distribution/equity and poverty.  View
    Healthforthcoming 
    Irrigationforthcoming 
       

     

  • Analytical techniques

    TechniqueDescription/highlightsLink
    How to conduct DEA analysis in excelPopular Nonparametric (deterministic) frontier approach used to investigate the relationship between spending and outcomes by measuring distance from the best-practice frontier

    Excel

    PPT

    How to conduct force, momentum and rigidity analysisApplying measures of public expenditure force, momentum and rigidoty can improve basic fiscal monitoring and inform fiscal consolidation by helping identify pressing fiscal concerns with potential to undermine fiscal space

    Excel

    PPT

    Fiscal multiplier estimationUsing a Structural Vector Autoregressive Model (SVAR), the tool allows to assess the link between spending and growthPPT
    How to run a CPATThe Carbon Pricing Assessment Tool (CPAT) is a spreadsheet-based tool to support rapid estimation of effects of carbon pricing and fossil fuel subsidy reforms along several economic and non- economic dimensions, including key macroeconomic variables, energy consumption, local and global pollutants, ¡®development co-benefits¡¯, distribution/equity and poverty.  

    Excel

    PPT

    How to estimate cyclicality of fiscal policyFiscal policy cyclicality can be assessed through Hodrick-Prescott filter or Kalman filterPPT
    Debt ThresholdsDebt thresholds - defined as safe levels of pbulic debt or lower bound probability of debt distress - can be estimated via probit methodologyPPT
    Access governance diagnostics, , , ,  

     

    Efficiency Analysis

    This section presents analytical papers on budget efficiency analysis in a variety of policy areas. While none of the papers presented in this section used a BOOST database, the techniques used in them can be extrapolated and replicated using BOOST. The objective of this section is, therefore, to encourage the user to approach policy analysis with an innovative approach taking advantage of all the tools at hand.


    This paper quantifies the inefficiency of public health expenditure and the associated potential gains for emerging and developing economies using a stochastic frontier model that controls for the socioeconomic determinants of health, and provides country-specific estimates. The results suggest that African economies have the lowest efficiency. At current spending levels, they could boost life expectancy up to about five years if they followed best practices.


    This report is intended to support the analysis and implementation of reforms aimed at a strengthening of the intergovernmental system in Colombia. In mid-2007 congress approved a legislative act as constitutional amendment that increases the level of the main transfer to sub-national governments, the General System of Transfers (SGP). However an adjustment of the regulations and institutional arrangements within the sectors is still pending. The report is intended to provide empirical evidence and technical inputs for a design of these complementary measures that are required. It will focus on examining how efficient sub-national governments are in service delivery within the existing intergovernmental arrangements and incentive framework. It will also analyze the underlying causes of low performance and suggest options for the government to address this challenge. The emphasis is on three sectors: education and health, which are both financed primarily by the SGP; and the road sector, which is financed outside the SGP. This focus will make evident the different types of intergovernmental management systems and the implications for efficiency.


    This paper attempts to measure efficiency and has two major parts. The first one estimates efficiency as the distance between observed input-output combinations and an efficiency frontier (defined as the maximum attainable output for a given level of inputs). This frontier is estimated for several health and education output indicators by means of the Free Disposable Hull (FDH) and Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) techniques. Both input-inefficiency (excess input consumption to achieve a level of output) and output-inefficiency (output shortfall for a given level of inputs) are scored in a sample of 140 countries using data from 1996 to 2002. The second part of the paper seeks to verify empirical regularities of the cross-country variation in efficiency.


    This study will present the stochastic frontier methodology and revisit the World Bank data while employing this alternative set of methods.  The first chapter of the presentation describes the stochastic frontier methodology.  Then , the methods will be illustrated in two applications, Christensen and Greene¡¯s (1976) data on electricity production, which is a standard platform for studying the stochastic frontier model and second, to a previously examined data set from the World Health Organization on health care and education attainment, allowing for both measured and unmeasured heterogeneity (cross country differences).  In our second chapter, we will apply the techniques developed to the World Bank data on health care and education.  This section will illustrate a variety of computations based on the stochastic frontier methodology.  The stochastic frontier production model has provided the standard platform for single output analysis of technical inefficiency in most studies. 


    This report examines the efficiency of public expenditures for education and health services in developing countries. Two datasets are analyzed: the first allows cross-country comparisons, using national-level data; the second permits comparisons across municipalities in a single country.


    This research outlines the policy context, objectives, and methodology practiced, to then focus on the extent to which municipalities benefited from efforts designed to provide additional resources for education. On pp 53-57 the article used the Data Envelopment Analysis (DAE) technique to use the empirical data from the municipalities and determine the efficiency in the use of resources and the impact on education.

     

    Equity analysis: Documents on Benefit Incidence Analysis


    This Stata program includes a module to perform Benefit Incidence Analysis.
    The main purpose of this project is to produce a comprehensive package of Stata modules to help analyze the distribution of living standards. It is hoped that this will be useful for measurement as well as for policy purposes.


    Benefit incidence analysis (BIA) considers who (in terms of socio-economic groups) receive what benefit from using health services. While traditionally BIA has focused on only publicly funded health services, to assess whether or not public subsidies are ¡®pro-poor¡¯, the same methodological approach can be used to assess how well the overall health system is performing in terms of the distribution of service benefits.


    The aim of this guide is to provide researchers and analysts with a step-by-step practical guide to the measurement of a variety of aspects of health equity. Chapter 14 (pp.165-175): Who Benefits from Health Sector Subsidies? provides a detailed Benefit Incidence Analysis on health.


    The paper demonstrates the usefulness of BIA in two dimensions. First, the paper finds, among other things, that overall education and health spending are poorly targeted; benefits from primary education and primary health care go disproportionately to the middle class, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, HIPCs and transition economies; but targeting has improved in the 1990s. Second, simple measures of association show that countries with a more pro-poor incidence of education and health spending tend to have better education and health outcomes, good governance, high per capita income, and wider accessibility to information.

    Practical Applications


    This paper uses a benefit incidence approach to estimate who gains from these services, both on average and at the margin, using data from the 2005/06 Kenya Integrated Household Budget Survey (KIHBS).

    The provides a statistical software package for free to perform different types of frontier and efficiency analysis, as well as detailed guidelines and working papers on the topic.

  • A Public Expenditure Review (PER) is a key diagnostics instrument used to evaluate the effectiveness of public finances. Within the World Bank, PERs continue to be among the most critical and commonly used corporate tools to analyze and engage on the quality of public expenditure and financial management systems in client countries, serving as the main instruments guiding and influencing policy dialogues around reforms covering the full public finance cycle and help mainstream public finance diagnostics in sectoral operations.

    A PER typically analyzes government expenditures over a period of years to assess their consistency with policy priorities, and what results were achieved. A PER may analyze government-wide expenditures or may focus on a particular sector as Health Care, Education, or Infrastructure.

    Many governments have made strides to include PERs as part of their budget planning cycle. Whether across the whole of government or focusing on a single sector, by examining how public expenditure was allocated and managed, governments and donors are better able to assess not only the impact of their investment, but also the effectiveness of budget planning and execution. PERs help diagnose spending problems and help countries develop more effective and transparent budget allocations. The objective is to establish a baseline understanding of key fiscal management and policy challenges, highlight priority reform areas for policymakers, and set the agenda for the next phase of budgetary planning.

    To access all PERs, click here. To see PERs dedicated to education sector, .