The Distribution of Education and Health Services in Madagascar over the 1990s: Increasing Progressivity in an Era of Low Growth

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While a number of benefit incidence studies of public expenditures have been carried out for African countries, there are very few studies that look at how the incidence of such expenditures has been changing over time. We analyse three rounds of nation-wide household surveys in Madagascar over the 1990s, a period of weak economic growth but significant changes in social sector organisation and budgets. Education and health services for the most part are distributed more equally than household expenditures, hence they serve to redistribute welfare from the rich to the poor. By stricter standards of progressivity, however, public services do poorly. Few services other than primary schooling accrue disproportionately to the poor in absolute terms. When further adjusted for differences in the numbers of potential beneficiaries in different expenditure quintiles (e.g., school-age children), none of the education or health benefits considered appear to target the poor while several target the non-poor. With regard to changes over the decade, however, primary enrolments not only rose sharply but also became significantly more progressive; since the country experienced little or no growth in household incomes during the period, this appears to reflect supply rather than demand side factors. The improvement in equity in public schooling occurred in part because the enrolment growth was in effect regionally targeted: it occurred only in rural areas, which are poorer. Copyright 2006, Oxford University Press.