Africa > Malawi

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International Monetary Fund. African Dept.
This Selected Issues paper benchmarks Malawi’s public spending and identifies areas where there is scope to improve expenditure efficiency. Malawi performs poorly in health and education spending efficiency. Spending in these areas will need to be stepped up to achieve better living standards and higher, more inclusive growth. A rebalancing of the composition of education and health spending—including greater prioritization of low cost-high impact spending and balancing maintenance against capital spending—would yield immediate results in both health and education. Strengthening the public expenditure management chain, especially procurement and supply management, will be important. These reforms would go hand in hand with greater fiscal transparency and accountability in these sectors.
International Monetary Fund
The Fund provides considerable support to low-income countries (LICs). This includes concessional financing from the Poverty Reduction and Growth Trust (PRGT), which currently carries an interest rate of zero percent. Since 2010, over half of Fund-supported arrangements have involved a PRGT facility. Support for poverty reduction is a core objective of arrangements supported by these facilities. This paper examines how PRGT-supported programs safeguard spending on poor and vulnerable groups within the broader framework of promoting inclusive growth. In some cases, national poverty reduction programs seek to shift expenditures toward social programs in the context of generally higher spending supported by domestic revenue mobilization, grants, or debt financing. In other cases, the goal is to safeguard poor and vulnerable groups from fiscal adjustment and reform measures that could adversely affect them by adopting countervailing policy measures to strengthen social safety nets. In discussing social safeguards, this paper focuses on how and if these objectives are reflected satisfactorily in the design of PRGT and PSI-supported programs. The effectiveness of social spending in improving social outcomes, including by durably reducing poverty, is beyond the scope of the paper.
Mr. Erwin H Tiongson
,
Mr. Hamid R Davoodi
, and
Sawitree S. Asawanuchit
This paper provides a primer on benefit incidence analysis (BIA) for macroeconomists and a new data set on the benefit incidence of education and health spending covering 56 countries over 1960-2000, representing a significant improvement in quality and coverage over existing compilations. The paper demonstrates the usefulness of BIA in two dimensions. First, the paper finds, among other things, that overall education and health spending are poorly targeted; benefits from primary education and primary health care go disproportionately to the middle class, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, HIPCs and transition economies; but targeting has improved in the 1990s. Second, simple measures of association show that countries with a more propoor incidence of education and health spending tend to have better education and health outcomes, good governance, high per capita income, and wider accessibility to information. The paper explores policy implications of these findings.
Mr. Markus Haacker
The paper provides an analysis of the impact of HIV/AIDS on the health sector, public education, the supply of labor and the returns to training in nine Southern African countries. Drawing on the preceding sections, it assesses the impact of HIV/AIDS on per capita income in a neoclassical growth framework. HIV/AIDS affects per capita income mainly through its impact of human capital, as measured by the supply of experienced workers. Other factors include the impact on capital accumulation, on education, and on total factor productivity.
Mr. Markus Haacker
The paper provides an economic analysis of the impact of HIV/AIDS on the health sector i Southern Africa. It provides indicators for the scale of the impact, including estimates of tr. costs of various forms treatment. In anticipation of increasing numbers of patients with HIV/AIDS-related diseases, it is essential to expand the already strained health facilities ar to substantially increase the training of health personnel. While proposed reductions in the prices of antiretroviral therapies will considerably expand the range of those who can affor them, they will remain accessible to a minority of the population only.