PETS - Examples and major findings

The Public Expenditure Tracking approach was developed by a group of researchers in the World Bank and was first applied to a study of a primary education reform in Uganda in 1996. Since then, several dozen PETS have been implemented around the world, both in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and in Eastern Europe.

PETS - Examples and findings
Education sector	Uganda (I and II) | Tanzania | Zambia
Health sector	Rwanda | Ghana | Nigeria

Among the main findings are:

• The amount of leakage is often difficult to estimate, due to poor bookkeeping.
  
• Leakage rates are extremely high in some cases.
  
• There are fewer problems with leakage in salary expenditures compared to non-salary expenditures.
• The potential for leakage may be greater in the health sector than in the education sector, due to larger non-salary expenditures in health.
  
• Local involvement at the frontline service delivery posts may result in better financial management at this level than at district and regional offices.
  
• The organisation/mode of transfer of public resources (for instance: cash vs. in kind) may be important for the amount of leakage. Policy implications are highly context dependent.
• The issue of corruption is often not explicitly addressed.

PETS vary greatly in content, including:

• the types of expenditure tracked
  
• the number of levels of public administration studied
  
• the sectors analysed
  
• the degree to which explanation is sought for the observed patterns in resource flows

PETS vary greatly in quality (e.g., data quality, sample size)
Some, but not all, PETS are conducted on large, representative samples. A minimum requirement in order to qualify as a PETS is that resource flows are tracked at least at two different levels of public administration. Not all studies that are announced as PETS satisfy this criterion. Therefore, this page does not attempt to provide a complete overview of all PETS conducted, but rather focuses on some of the more successful ones.

There are fewer examples of successful PETS in the health sector than in the education sector. Attempts at conducting PETS in the health sector have been seriously hampered by unreliable and inconsistent budgets and/or little systematic information on financial flows at facility level (e.g., Mozambique, Honduras, Uganda).