A Guiding Framework For Nutrition Public Expenditure Reviews

Nutrition investments affect human capital formation, which in turn affects economic growth. Malnutrition is intrinsically connected to human capital—undernutrition contributes to nearly half of child mortality, and stunting reduces productivity and earnings in adulthood. Improving nutrition requires a multisectoral effort, but it is difficult to identify and quantify the basic financing parameters as used in traditional sectors. What is being spent and by whom and on what? To address these questions, nutrition public expenditure reviews (NPERs) determine the level of a country’s overall nutrition public spending and assess whether its expenditure profile will enable the country to realize its nutrition goals and objectives. When done well, NPERs go beyond simply quantifying how much is spent on nutrition; they measure how well money is being spent to achieve nutrition outcomes and identify specific recommendations for improvement. A Guiding Framework for Nutrition Public Expenditure Reviews presents the key elements of an NPER and offers guidance, practical steps, and examples for carrying out an NPER. The book draws upon good practices from past NPERs as well as common practices and expertise from public expenditure reviews in other sectors. This handbook is intended for practitioners who are tasked with carrying out NPERs. Other target audiences include country nutrition policy makers, development partner officials, government technical staff, and nutrition advocates. The book presents data and analytical challenges faced by previous NPER teams and lays out the kinds of analyses that past NPERs have been able to carry out and those that they were unable to perform because of data or capacity constraints. It concludes with further work needed at the global and country levels to create the conditions necessary to conduct more comprehensive NPERs.

World Bank Discussion Paper No. 318. Analyzes the condition needed for achieving sustainable private sector growth in the Visegrad countries--the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and the Slovak Republic. The analysis focuses on the legal and regulatory framework and institutional capacity, the privatization of state enterprises, and private sector development.

Public Expenditures, Growth, and Poverty assesses the efficacy of poverty reduction programs in Latin America, Africa, and Asia by synthesizing studies conducted by the International Food Policy Research Institute over the past ten years. Overall, the studies find that investments in agricultural research, infrastructure, and human capital are beneficial in the long term, while food aid and poverty reduction programs have little utility beyond immediately abating hunger and generating short-run income effects. The book develops a conceptual framework for analyzing public expenditures and their short- and long-run impact on poverty through various channels. It surveys spending trends and analyzes the effect of growing public investment on urban and rural poverty through case studies of India, China, Thailand, and Uganda. And it highlights the advantages of directing spending toward public works programs that engage impoverished peoples rather than using the limited aid money on food subsidies and other passive donations. Featuring discussions about the roles of various social safety net programs and a chapter devoted solely to the vexing poverty in sub-Saharan Africa, Public Expenditures, Growth, and Poverty will aid policy makers and encourage further, more analytic study of worldwide poverty reduction programs.

In order to maintain the strong progress achieved since 2000 and meet Africa's longer-term challenges, it is important for both African governments and their international partners to meet their development commitments and to monitor and evaluate their results.

Worldwide, the number of poor people increased during the past decade, despite technological improvements, more open trade, and improved policy frameworks in developing countries. Regional conflicts, adverse shifts in terms of trade, and marginalization of poor countries in the new global economy explain this outcome. This highlights the need to reform development assistance and improve its effectiveness. Making Development Work examines the four key principles of the Comprehensive-Development Framework, a World Bank initiative currently being piloted in twelve developing counties. The initiative promotes a holistic long-term vision of development, domestic ownership of development programs, and focus on results; and stronger partnership between government, the private sector, and the civil society. The first section of the volume describes the evolution in development thinking that culminated in this new consensus. The second focuses on country ownership of development policies and programs. Based on empirical evidence, it proposes a new view of the aid relationship as a mutual-learning process. The third section focuses on results and on the ways aid agencies might enhance development impact of their operations. It concludes with a preliminary assessment of strategies for scaling up from specific projects to sector and programmatic approaches, and suggests ways to adapt them to counter conditions. The experience of a bilateral aid agency, U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), is examined in this context. The fourth section focuses on partnership, emphasizing that aid agencies must be explicit about the kinds of partnerships they seek with countries and the kinds of strategic selectivity they will exercise. The final chapter pulls together the lessons of development experience at various levels of operation. It outlines key tensions between comprehensiveness and selectivity, ownership and conditionality, speed and broad-based ownership, focus on results and poor local evaluation capacity, and enhanced country focus and globalization. Promising approaches to manage these tensions are put forward to replace one-size-fits-all prescriptions with client empowerment and social learning. Making Development Work offers rich lessons on improving the effectiveness of aid. It will be of particular interest to development practitioners, students and professors of development economics studies. Nagy Hanna is a lead corporate strategist and evaluation officer at the World Bank. He has published extensively on development, management, and knowledge. Robert Picciotto is director-general of Operations Evaluation at the World Bank.

This report summarize the experience since 2008 of the global efforts coordinated by the World Bank to use National Health Accounts (NHA) to better assess sources and allocation of public, donor and private health expenditures and inform countries' health financing policies.