Health services are largely tax-financed in the United Kingdom and account for 14 per cent of general government spending. This paper analyses how the National Health Service (NHS) has been dealing with the associated expenditure pressures in the pre-1990 set-up and during the “quasi-market”...

This paper derives estimates of the efficiency of welfare spending in Slovenia and the other OECD countries from data envelopment analysis based on model specifications used in earlier OECD studies. Results suggest that Slovenia ranks about 25th among OECD countries for output efficiency: for a...

The crisis revealed the need for a strategic review of the existing social protection system in Estonia. Extreme income fluctuations on one side and low social benefits on the other side exposed fragile groups in the population to a significant poverty risk. The government has recently...

Restoring fiscal sustainability is a major challenge in Slovenia. Yet, the performance in terms of expenditure control is poor and public expenditure on social spending increased briskly during the crisis, significantly more than on average across the OECD. Despite recent progress in reforming...

Substantial fiscal consolidation was achieved under the aegis of the 2003 Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Management Act. While deficits widened anew in 2008 and 2009, against the backdrop of the global financial and economic crisis, efforts to reduce them have resumed since. To ensure...

Austria enjoys strong material well-being and high quality of life. Steady convergence with top GDP per capita levels translated into decisive improvements in household disposable incomes while significant redistribution has ensured low income inequality and poverty. This has been combined with...

Investment in network infrastructure – the energy, water, transport and telecommunication networks – which performs a vital role for the functioning of the economy, can contribute to raising growth and social welfare. But more is not always better. While the paper shows that investment in...

The UK medium-term budgetary framework introduced in 1997 addressed a number of weaknesses of the former regime, notably a bias against capital expenditure and, more generally, poor conditions for longerterm planning adversely affecting central government spending departments, local authorities...

The economic crisis in the early 1990s prompted action on reforming the Swedish welfare state and its institutions, including deregulation of a wide range of product markets. In that way, Sweden took early action compared to other OECD countries currently struggling with how to make public...

This paper highlights some key policy issues regarding the performance of public expenditure and proposes an analytical framework for its assessment. The framework distinguishes three economic objectives of policies in the pursuit of better performance of public expenditure: macroeconomic...