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When social security is established to provide pensions to parents, their reliance upon children for future financial support decreases, and their need to save for retirement also falls. In this study, the expansion of pension coverage from the state sector to the non-state sector in urban China is used as a quasi-experiment to analyze the intergenerational impact of social security on education investments in children. In a difference-in-differences framework, a significant increase in the total education expenditure is found to be attributable to pension expansion. The results are unlikely to be driven by other observable trends. They are robust to the inclusion of a large set of control variables and to different specifications, including one based on the instrumental variable method.

Debt markets --- Education --- Education expenditure --- Finance and financial sector development --- Health, nutrition and population --- Pension --- Pensions & retirement systems --- Population & development --- Primary education --- Social protections and labor --- Urban

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Governments of developing countries typically spend between 20 and 30 percent of gross domestic product. Hence, small changes in the efficiency of public spending could have a major impact on aggregate productivity growth and gross domestic product levels. Therefore, measuring efficiency and comparing input-output combinations of different decision-making units becomes a central challenge. This paper gauges efficiency as the distance between observed input-output combinations and an efficiency frontier estimated by means of the Free Disposal Hull and Data Envelopment Analysis techniques. Input-inefficiency (excess input consumption to achieve a level of output) and output-inefficiency (output shortfall for a given level of inputs) are scored in a sample of 175 countries using data from 2006-16 on education, health, and infrastructure. The paper verifies empirical regularities of the cross-country variation in efficiency, showing a negative association between efficiency and spending levels and the ratio of public-to-private financing of the service provision. Other variables, such as inequality, urbanization, and aid dependency, show mixed results. The efficiency of capital spending is correlated with the quality of governance indicators, especially regulatory quality (positively) and perception of corruption (negatively). Although no causality may be inferred from this exercise, it points at different factors to understand why some countries might need more resources than others to achieve similar education, health, and infrastructure outcomes.

Cholera --- Communicable Diseases --- Education --- Education Expenditure --- Educational Sciences --- Efficiency Frontiers --- Efficiency Of Public Spending --- Health Care Services Industry --- Health Expenditure --- Industry --- Infrastructure Spending --- Leprosy --- Population & Development --- Public Sector Development --- Tuberculosis

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This paper adopts a new approach to the issue of foreign aid fungibility. In contrast to most existing empirical studies, panel data are employed that contain information on the specific purposes for which aid is given. This allows linking aid that is provided for education and health purposes to recipient public spending in these sectors. In addition, aid flows that are recorded on a recipient's budget are distinguished from those that are not recorded on budget, and the previous failure to differentiate between on- and off-budget aid is shown to produce biased estimates of fungibility. Sector program aid is the measure of on-budget aid, whereas technical cooperation serves as a proxy for off-budget aid. The appropriate treatment of off-budget aid leads to lower fungibility estimates than those reported in many previous studies. Specifically, in both sectors and across a range of specifications, technical cooperation, which is the largest component of total education and health aid, leads to, at most, a small displacement of recipient public expenditures.

Debt Markets --- Disability --- Finance and Financial Sector Development --- Foreign aid --- Fungibility --- Gender and Health --- Health Monitoring & Evaluation --- Macroeconomics and Economic Growth --- Public education expenditure --- Public health expenditure --- Public Sector Expenditure Policy