How PETS Can Help Make
Services Work for Poor People
Distance Learning Clinic
April 14, 2004
Ritva Reinikka
Research Manager
Development Research Group
The World Bank
Similar changes in public spending can be
associated with vastly different changes in
outcomes
Sources: Spending data from World Development Indicators database. School completion from Bruns, Mingat and Rakatomalala 2003
Unit cost and performance in
primary education: Mauritania
A framework of
relationships of accountability
Policymakers
Poor people
Providers
Short and long routes of
accountability
The relationship of accountability
has five features
Expenditure incidence
Health
Source: Filmer 2003b
Education
Public expenditure tracking surveys
• New information on finance and performance
of service providers
– on provider organizations and frontline
– for policymakers and users/clients
– as actual spending data are seldom available
• Flow of financial and in-kind resources from the
center down to the frontline and users
– Ministries, local governments, schools
– Nonwage and salaries
• Sample surveys
– Same idea as in enterprise or household surveys
The First PETS in Uganda
• Health and education sectors
• Data from different levels of
administration, including 250 schools
and 100 health facilities
• Only 13 percent of intended capitation
grant actually reached schools (1991-95)
• Other findings
Enrollment trends differed from published data
Importance of parental contributions
Leakage of nowage funds in primary
education in Uganda (%)
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
2001
Source: Reinikka (2001);
Mean
97
96
85
84
78
18
Reinikka & Svensson (2003)
Median
100
100
100
100
100
18
Leakage of nonwage funds in primary
education: Evidence from PETS (%)
Country
Ghana 2000
Peru 2002* utilities only
Tanzania 1998
Zambia 2001 rule-based
Zambia 2001 discretion
Source: Ye and Canagarajah (2002) for
Ghana; Price Waterhouse Coopers (1998) for
Tanzania; Das et al. (2002) for Zambia
Mean
49
30
57
10
76
Ghost workers on payroll (%)
Country
Education
Health
Honduras 2000
5
8.3
Uganda 1993
20
-
Source: World Bank 2001
Reinikka 2001
Explaining capture of public
funds in Uganda
• Large variations in receipts across schools
• Corruption explained by interaction between local
officials and end-users
– Bargaining between local officials and schools
– Information and using voice -- costly
• Leakage endogenous to school characteristics
– Income
– Size of school
– Teacher qualifications
Evaluating the impact of an
information campaign
• Central government in Uganda launched an
information campaign in 1996 targeted to
– Parents and schools
– A signal to local governments
• Before and after comparison
– Huge improvement and reduction in leakage
– 3/4 attributed to information campaign
• Schools with access to newspapers reduced
leakage by 14%
Schools in Uganda received more of
what they were due
Source: Reinikka and Svensson (2001), Reinikka and Svensson (2003a)
Zambia
• Focus on resources and learning results
– Combines public expenditure tracking with a
household survey and testing of pupils for
learning outcomes
• Educational equity
– Household survey enables PETS to relate
school funding received to whether schools are
“rich” or “poor” and to private spending on
education
Peru
• Diagnostic PETS exposed the confusion in
the processes of administering the budget
• Inadequacy and unresponsiveness
– Non-salary spending fell short of schools’ needs
– Implementing units rarely responded to
school’s requests
IIEP Training Module for PETS
and other provider surveys
• Use of micro-level surveys
– Multi-angular data collection
– Sampling and data management
• Case studies
– Peru
– Uganda
– Zambia
• Sample questionnaire for school survey
Provider surveys 2002: Absence rates
(%) among teachers and health-care
workers
Country
Ecuador
Honduras 2000
Peru
India
Indonesia
Uganda
Zambia
Primary schools
16
14
13
25
18
26
17
Health facilities
27
26
43
42
35
-
Implementation issues: Who? How?
• Requires skills like any other micro survey
• Steps in implementation
Concept
Buy-in across the board
Questionnaire design
Identify (and contract) implementing agency
Pilot
Enumerator training
Field work (including quality control and data entry)
Analysis and dissemination
Concluding remarks
• With proper survey techniques it is possible
to collect quantitative data on frontline
service provision
• Conventional mechanisms such as audit,
supervision, legislative reviews may not be
enough
• Enhance client power -- parents’ ability to
monitor and improve their bargaining
position
– Information is crucial
Finding out more on PETS…
• Survey reports, instruments, and documentation on:
www.publicspending.org
• http://www1.worldbank.org/publicsector/pe/trackingsurveys.htm
• Some references:
– Dehn, Reinikka, and Svensson. 2003. “Survey Tools for Assessing Performance in
Service Delivery.” In Bourguignon and Pereira da Silva, eds. Evaluating the
Poverty and Distributional Impact of Economic Policies. Oxford University Press
and the World Bank. Forthcoming
– Reinikka and Svensson. 2002. Measuring and understanding corruption at the
micro level. In Della Porta and Rose-Ackerman, eds. Corrupt Exchanges:
Empirical Themes in the Politics and Political Economy of Corruption. Nomos
Verlagsgesellshaft.
– Lindelow and Wagstaff. 2002. “Health Facility Surveys: An Introduction.” Policy
Research Working Paper 2953. The World Bank.
• Email: rreinikka@worldbank.org