Improving the Efficiency and Equity of Public Education Spending: The Case of Moldova


Book Description

This paper, using Moldova as an example, presents a systematic approach to assess the efficiency and equity of public education spending, identify sources of inefficiencies and inequality, and formulate potential reform options. The analytical framework combines international benchmarking with country-specific analysis—such as microeconomic analysis based on household survey data—and can provide important insights into diagnosing and reforming education systems. The analysis finds significant scope to improve both efficiency and equity of the education sector in Moldova. Potential reform measures include further consolidating the oversized school network, reducing overstaffing, and better targeting government subsidies. The current remuneration policy could also be improved to attract high quality teachers and incentivize performance.




Improving the Efficiency and Euity of Public Education Spending


Book Description

This paper, using Moldova as an example, presents a systematic approach to assess the efficiency and equity of public education spending, identify sources of inefficiencies and inequality, and formulate potential reform options. The analytical framework combines international benchmarking with country-specific analysis—such as microeconomic analysis based on household survey data—and can provide important insights into diagnosing and reforming education systems. The analysis finds significant scope to improve both efficiency and equity of the education sector in Moldova. Potential reform measures include further consolidating the oversized school network, reducing overstaffing, and better targeting government subsidies. The current remuneration policy could also be improved to attract high quality teachers and incentivize performance.




Moldova Public Expenditure Review


Book Description

This report reviews intergovernmental fiscal relations in Moldova and recommends ways to improve the efficiency and equity of local public finance, while maintaining fiscal sustainability. Local public authorities are responsible for meeting key public service delivery needs. They play a major role in education and bear primary responsibility for urban and rural functions such as water supply and local road construction and maintenance. But local authorities are unable to fulfill this role due to sub-optimal size, inadequate financial capacity, and low administrative capacity. The Government of Moldova is reforming intergovernmental fiscal relations, as part of broader commitments under the national decentralization strategy (2012). They set new rates for sharing national taxes with the two tiers of local government, introduce formulas for transfers to local governments, and remove subordination in financial relations between top and bottom tiers of local government. This report reviews recent reforms in local public finance and makes suggestions to further improve subnational expenditures, fiscal policy, and budgetary processes. Suggestions are made in five key areas: (i) address the inefficiencies of expenditures related to the high fragmentation of Moldova's administrative-territorial organization; (ii) improve the efficiency and equity of intergovernmental transfer formulas; (iii) help develop the revenue capacity of local governments; (iv) improve public investment management at the local level; and (v) ensure sustainability of subnational debt.




A Strategy for IMF Engagement on Social Spending


Book Description

Interest in social spending issues has intensified over the last decade. This reflects concerns about rising inequality and the need to support vulnerable groups, especially in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. In line with this, the Fund has also increased its engagement on social spending issues. This paper outlines a strategy to guide IMF engagement on social spending issues going forward.




Reforming Education and Challenging Inequalities in Southern Contexts


Book Description

This book offers in-depth analyses of how education interacts with social inequality in Southern contexts. Drawing on a range of disciplinary frameworks, it presents new analyses of existing knowledge and new empirical data which define the challenges and possibilities of successful educational reform. It is a tribute to the work of the late Christopher Colclough, who, as a leading figure in education and international development, played a key role in the global fight for education for all children. The book critically engages with international evidence of educational access, retention and outcomes, offering new understandings of how social inequalities currently facilitate, mediate or restrict educational opportunities. It exposes the continuing influence of wealth and regional inequalities and caste and gendered social structures. Researchers in Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Pakistan and Uganda highlight how the aspirations of families living in poverty remain unfilled by poor-quality education and low economic opportunities and how schools and teachers currently address issues of gender, disability and diversity. The book highlights a range of new priorities for research and identifies some necessary strategies for education reform, policy approaches and school practice, if educational equality for all children is to be achieved. The book will be of great interest to researchers, scholars, educational practitioners and policy-makers in the fields of economics, politics and sociology of education, international education, poverty research and international development. The Foreword, Chapters 1, 6, 7, and 12 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9780429293467 under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license (Foreword, Chapters 1, 6, and 12) and a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (Chapter 7).




Global Economic Prospects, June 2021


Book Description

The world economy is experiencing a very strong but uneven recovery, with many emerging market and developing economies facing obstacles to vaccination. The global outlook remains uncertain, with major risks around the path of the pandemic and the possibility of financial stress amid large debt loads. Policy makers face a difficult balancing act as they seek to nurture the recovery while safeguarding price stability and fiscal sustainability. A comprehensive set of policies will be required to promote a strong recovery that mitigates inequality and enhances environmental sustainability, ultimately putting economies on a path of green, resilient, and inclusive development. Prominent among the necessary policies are efforts to lower trade costs so that trade can once again become a robust engine of growth. This year marks the 30th anniversary of the Global Economic Prospects. The Global Economic Prospects is a World Bank Group Flagship Report that examines global economic developments and prospects, with a special focus on emerging market and developing economies, on a semiannual basis (in January and June). Each edition includes analytical pieces on topical policy challenges faced by these economies.




Europe and Central Asia Economic Update, Fall 2021


Book Description

Although global economic activity is recovering and output in Europe and Central Asia (ECA) is expected to grow in 2021, containing COVID-19 remains a challenge in the region. Enterprise survey data for the emerging and developing countries in the region show that COVID-19 had a profound and heterogeneous impact on firms. Smaller, younger, and female-run businesses were hit harder and had greater difficulty recovering. But the crisis also played a cleansing role and economic activity in ECA appears to have been reallocated toward more productive firms during the crisis, particularly in countries with more competitive markets. Firms with high pre-crisis labor productivity experienced significantly smaller drops in sales and employment than firms with low pre-crisis labor productivity and were also more likely to adapt to the crisis by increasing online activity and remote work. Many governments in ECA implemented broad policy support schemes to address the initial economic fallout from the crisis. Overall, this government support was more likely to go to less productive and larger firms, regardless of the level of their pre-crisis innovation. As economies enter the economic recovery phase, it will be important for policy makers in all countries to phase out broad policy support measures as soon as appropriate and focus on fostering a competitive business environment, which is key to a strong recovery, resilience to future crises, and sustainable, long-term economic growth.




Improving Public Expenditure Efficiency for Growth and Poverty Reduction


Book Description

The Government of Moldova's Economic Growth and Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (EGPRSP) lays out an ambitious plan for sustaining growth and poverty reduction and reshaping the government to meet the needs of a market economy. The public expenditures envisaged under this ambitious plan, however, vastly exceed the domestic resources available to the Government. Additional foreign budgetary support may help alleviate some of that resource constraint. Recognizing that the share of tax revenues and expenditures to GDP in Moldova already greatly exceed comparable international levels, generating additional domestic tax resources risks crowding out the private sector and undermining growth prospects. This suggests that in order to finance higher order public expenditures priorities, the Government needs to create fiscal space from within the existing resource envelope. This will require inter and intra-sectoral reallocation of expenditures and an increase in the efficiency of public spending rather than increasing the relative size of government.




Golden Growth


Book Description

The public debt crisis in Europe has shaken the confidence not just in the Euro, but in the European model. Aging and uneconomical Europeans are being squeezed between innovative Americans and efficient Asians, it is said. With debt and demographics dragging down them down, one hears that European economies will not grow much unless radically new ways are discovered. The end of complacency in Europe is a good thing, but this loss of confidence could be dangerous. The danger is that in a rush to rejuvenate growth, the attractive attributes of the European development model could be abandoned along with the weak. In fact, the European growth model has many strong points and enviable accomplishments. One can say without exaggeration that Europe had invented a convergence machine , taking in poor countries and helping them become high income economies. World Bank research has identified 27 countries that have grown from middle-income to high income since 1987: a few thanks to the discovery and exploitation of massive natural resources (e.g.: oil in Oman and Trinidad and Tobago), several others like Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea, embracing aggressive export-led strategies which involved working and saving a lot, postponing political liberties, and looking out only for themselves. But half of the countries that have grown from middle income to high income Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Malta, Poland, Portugal, Slovak Republic, and Slovenia are actually in Europe. This is why the European model was so attractive and unique, and why with some well designed efforts it ought to be made right again.




The Efficiency of Government Expenditure


Book Description

This paper assesses the efficiency of government expenditure on education and health in 38 countries in Africa in 1984-95, both in relation to each other and compared with countries in Asia and the Western Hemisphere. The results show that, on average, countries in Africa are less efficient than countries in Asia and the Western Hemisphere; however, education and health spending in Africa became more efficient during that period. The assessment further suggests that improvements in educational attainment and health output in African countries require more than just higher budgetary allocations.