More, Better, or Different Spending? Trends in Public Expenditure on Water and Sanitation in Sub-Saharan Africa
This overview paper tests current public spending patterns against the economic rationale for such spending, including reducing disparities in service delivery and overcoming market failures. Reducing the disparities in access to basic water supply...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2014
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2011/12/15978054/more-better-or-different-spending-trends-public-expenditure-water-sanitation-sub-saharan-africa http://hdl.handle.net/10986/17224 |
| Summary: | This overview paper tests current public
spending patterns against the economic rationale for such
spending, including reducing disparities in service delivery
and overcoming market failures. Reducing the disparities in
access to basic water supply and sanitation (WSS) is a
responsibility of government. Individuals have little
incentive to build and maintain extensive WSS
infrastructure, but communities and societies do. Targeted
public spending benefitting households that otherwise would
be unable to afford those services can be a component of a
broader social policy agenda to redistribute resources to
the poor. Several market features call for government
intervention in the WSS sector. This review mines the rich
data of 15 Public Expenditure Reviews (PERs) conducted in
Sub-Saharan Africa and funded by the World Bank over the
past years. From 2003 the World Bank has funded more than 40
PERs that contain an analysis of the water supply and
sanitation (WSS) sector. In most of these, the WSS sector is
discussed alongside other sectors. A set of stand-alone PERs
specifically addressing the WSS sector have also been
carried out in African countries. The scope of the present
review includes expenditures by public institutions (at the
central and local government levels) on domestic resources
and grants or loans provided by external funding agencies.
The review does not include off-budget spending by water
utilities. In other words, while the numbers in this review
include public subsidies to utilities, they do not include
expenditure by utilities, thus disregarding expenditures
paid for by consumer cost-recovery. The public expenditure
analyses in all reviews focus on WSS services, although some
reports also discuss water resources management. Almost all
of the PERs, however, are limited to WSS, thus excluding
water resources management and irrigation issues from the
analyses. The reviewed PERs did not use standard
definitions, which has led to some data limitations
described later. This review is a data mining exercise of
country PERs that were written to serve in the political
dialogue on the challenges in achieving the Millennium
Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015 and on bottlenecks in
enhancing public finance management performance. |
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