This Public Expenditure Review (PER) was prepared by the World Bank at the request of the Ministry of Finance of Cabo Verde. With a debt-to-GDP ratio of 126 percent in 2017, Cabo Verde is the most indebted country in Sub-Saharan Africa. The country is also at a high of risk of external debt...

All interested parties seem to agree that it is important to be able to monitor public sector performance at the sectoral level, but most current work based on multi-country databases does not lend itself to country-specific conclusions. This is due to a large extent to major data limitations...

The authors examine the role of governance-measured by level of corruption and quality of bureaucracy-and ask how it affects the relationship between public spending and outcomes. Their main innovation is to see if differences in efficacy of public spending can be explained by quality of...

This paper studies the links between public spending, governance, and outcomes. We examine the role of governance--measured by the level of corruption and the quality of bureaucracy--in determining the efficacy of public spending in improving human development outcomes. Our analysis contributes...

There is little empirical evidence to support the claim that public spending improves education and health indicators. This paper uses cross-sectional data for 50 developing and transition countries to show that expenditure allocations within the two social sectors improve both access to and...

This paper analyzes Central America's track record on inequality, poverty, and quality of fiscal adjustment in relation to economic growth; health and education outcomes; adequacy of social safety nets; and governance. It then assesses the degree to which the track record can be traced to...

The paper investigates empirically the impact of ethnic heterogeneity on the amount of public spending on health and education and the quality, or technical efficiency of spending. While it finds partial evidence for the claim that more heterogeneous societies spend less on public goods, it...