Approaches to Improve the Composition of Public Expenditures

When: Thursday, October 13, 2005, 9:00 - 2:00 pm
Where: Room MC C1-100

Chair: Shantayanan  Devarajan, Chief Economist, SARVP

Presenters: Shenggen Fan, Division Director,  International Food Policy Research Institute
                   Hans Lofgren, Senior Economist, DECPG 
                   Emmanuel Pinto Moreira, Senior Economist, AFTP3

Discussants: Delfin Go, Lead Economist, AFRCE
                    Rodrigo Suescun, Senior Economist, LCRCE
                             
Panelists: Eduardo Fernandez, University of Illinois (former Deputy Minister of Finance, Colombia)
                 Zakir Ahmed Khan, Alternate ED (former Secretary of Finance, Bangladesh)

A number of recent initiatives have emphasized poverty reduction as a primary development policy goal. The HIPC Initiative, the PRSPs, and the broad agreement on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have all emphasized the need to identify specific policies and programs for effectively reducing poverty.  A key challenge in pursuing this goal is to find the appropriate composition of public spending. The Bank's main instrument to inform policy dialogue with governments on this topic are Public Expenditure Reviews (PER). But there is a dearth of useful guidance and empirical work on the impact of the composition of public spending on growth, equity and absolute poverty.

This workshop is primarily geared toward PER teams who seek technical and practical guidelines for analyzing the appropriate allocation of public expenditures. It brings together researchers, policy analysts, and practitioners with extensive experience in this area. Speakers will present several empirical approaches representative of cutting-edge efforts to analyze the link between expenditure composition, growth, inequality, and poverty. The following discussion will provide an opportunity to discuss the relative strengths and weaknesses of existing approaches and practical considerations to guide analytical work.  The workshop will conclude with a panel of practitioners  from different regions, reflecting on their experiences with balancing analytics, politics and resource constraints.

Agenda (13.13kb PDF)

Background Matrials:

• Roads Out of Poverty? Assessing the Links Between Aid, Public Investment, Growth and Poverty Reduction (493kb PDF)
• Economywide Simulations of Ethiopian MDG Strategies (126kb PDF)
• Returns to Public Investments in the Less-Favored Areas of India and China (417kb PDF)

Presentations

• Public Investment, Growth, and the MDGs: A Macro Monitoring Framework for Low-Income Countries (299kb PDF)
• Public Expenditure Analysis with MAMS (83kb PDF)
• Does Composition of Government Spending Matter? Evidence from China and India (121kb PDF)

Participants

• List of participants (19kb PDF)

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