Education and Health in Budget 2016: Grand promises don’t bode well for governance

Abstract

Governments make attractive promises when presenting the Budget. However, successive Budgets have shown that making promises is easier than keeping them. The extent to which the present government will be able to keep its promises will depend on its ability to raise targeted revenues and align actual spending priorities to those that are stated. Making promises that are unlikely to be kept does not bode well for governance. There are considerable variations between publicly declared sectoral Budget allocations and actual expenditure in previous years. The ‘actual’ priorities of the government, which can be different from the ‘stated’ priorities, are revealed when expenditures are cut to curtail the deficit as revenue comes in short of projections. Education and health area clearly “stated priority” of Budget 2016, and this indicates an important shift in policy. The Budget also reveals that much of the extra spending in these sectors is towards capital expenditure rather than recurrent. Budget 2016 contains a grand promise of increasing capital expenditure for health and education by over 120 percent all the way to Rs.210 billion. This insight suggests that the priorities revealed in the first nine months of the present government dampens expectations that this promise will be delivered on as stated and that this is a problem of governance.