Public Spending And The Poor

The book offers a critical assessment of the state of current knowledge on the distributional impacts of public spending for developing and transition countries. It focuses on the distribution of benefits from spending categories that have traditionally been seen as pro-poor, including education and health expenditures, food subsidies, cash transfers, and public employment schemes.

Abstract: Public spending has effects which are complex to trace and difficult to quantify. But the composition of public expenditure has become the key instrument by which development agencies seek to promote economic development. In recent years, the development assistance to heavily indebted poor countries (HIPCs) has been made conditional on increased expenditure on categories that are thought to be "pro-poor". This paper responds to the growing concern being expressed about the conceptual foundations and the empirical basis for the belief that poverty can be reduced through targeted public spending. While it is widely accepted that growth and redistribution are important sources of reduction in absolute poverty, a review of the literature confirms the lack of an appropriate theoretical framework for assessing the impact of public spending on growth as well as poverty. There is a need to combine principles of both public economics and growth theory to develop appropriate theoretical guidance for public expenditure policy. This paper identifies a number of approaches that are beginning to address this gap. Building on these approaches, it proposes a framework that has its foundation in a broadly articulated development strategy and its economic goals such as growth, equity, and poverty reduction. It recommends the use of public economics principles to clarify the roles of the private and public sectors and to recognize the complementarity of spending, taxation, and regulatory instruments available to affect public policy. With regard to the impact of any given type of public spending, policy recommendations must be tailored to countries and be based on empirical analysis that takes account of the lags and leads in their effects on equity and growth and ultimately on poverty. The paper sketches out such a framework as the first step in what will have to be a longer-term research agenda to provide theoretically and empirically robust and verifiable guidance to public spending policy.

A collection of essays by leading economists on how different tax regimes affect the overall prosperity of a country. The UK faces shrinking tax revenues and additional public spending demands, while taxpayers, jobs and investment can move to lower cost economies. The authors in this book argue these problems can be surmounted, if the tax system reflects supply and demand, as well as responding to social, cultural and political pressures. Taxes that penalise incentive and hold back economic growth should be avoided, as should those which deter saving and investment, and those which are too complex. Within this framework, it is possible to respond to added pressures to expand public services or for more spending on benefits.

Since public spending is often a crucial component of economic activity in any country, this paper looks at the implications of public spending and its effects on poverty in the Latin American context. Specifically, the paper focuses on two areas. First, because overall economic growth is a necessary condition for long-term poverty reduction, the incidence of public spending on the pace of development is of fundamental importance. Consequently, the paper examines what has been the experience in Latin America during the past fifteen to twenty years and how the state's role in the economy evolved. Second, the paper discusses the social incidence of public expenditures and its effects on poverty. The report indicates that achievement of resumed growth is clearly the goal toward which Latin American governments must be striving if more resources are to be freed for attending to the needs of the poor. However, the report goes on to conclude by saying that the only wise course of action is to consider a reform of government social agencies without further delay, rather than to wait for growth to resume before attacking the social problems of the poor.