This paper argues that micro-level tools are necessary to assess both the quality and quantity of services, and the complexities involved in transforming budgets into goods and services. Public Expenditure Tracking Surveys (PETS) and Quantitative Service Delivery Surveys (QSDS) have been developed in full recognition of the characteristics of public organizations, and with the specific objectives of identifying where service delivery problems arise, quantifying the relative importance, discovering how and why they arise, and devising means of resolving them. PETS and QSDS gather quantitative data on a sample survey basis, including inputs, outputs, and other characteristics, directly from the service-providing unit. PETS assess (often diagnostically) the issue of leakage of public funds or resources prior to reaching the intended beneficiary. QSDS take a service-facility-based approach to assessing incentives for facility level staff to produce high-quality services, and provide a measure for efficiency at the level of the frontline provider and information about determinants. This paper is intended to guide those who wish to undertake the PETS/QSDS. The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 outlines the motivation for developing PETS and QSDS, namely the persistent failure to observe close relationships between public sector spending and outcomes. Section 3 discusses general features of public service agencies that provide public services and some reasons why information on performance is not easy to obtain. Section 4 summarizes key features and potential uses of PETS and QSDS, including a comparison with other tools for public expenditure and service delivery analysis. In section 5, we highlight key lessons learned through implementing these surveys and provide det...

When perceptions are not enough for policy. How and why non-perception based corruption measurement techniques are developing to provide refined policy making data, and some of the key remaining challenges.

This paper explores the extent to which centrally financed educational expenditures are diverted at the local government level. 4 The experimental versus the non-experimental approach are debated in Burtless (1995) and Heckman and Smith (1995). In attempting to identify the impact of the information campaign, we face the problem that the pre-reform data was not collected with an evaluation purpose in mind. Specifically, we do not have survey data on the extent to which schools were informed about the grant program before the information campaign. Below we discuss three complementary empirical strategies to overcome this problem

All around the world in matters of governance, decentralization is the rage. Even apart from the widely debated issues of subsidiarity and devolution in the European Union and states ’ rights in the United States, decentralization has been at the center stage of policy experiments in the last two decades in a large number of developing and transition economies in Latin America, Africa and Asia. The World Bank, for example, has embraced it as one of the major governance reforms on its agenda (for example, World Bank, 2000; Burki, Perry and Dillinger, 1999). Take also the examples of the two largest countries of the world, China and India. Decentralization has been regarded as the major institutional framework for the phenomenal industrial growth in the last two decades in China, taking place largely in the nonstate nonprivate sector. India ushered in a landmark constitutional reform in favor of decentralization around the same time it launched a major program of economic reform in the early 1990s. On account of its many failures, the centralized state everywhere has lost a great deal of legitimacy, and decentralization is widely believed to promise a range of bene � ts. It is often suggested as a way of reducing the role of the state in general, by fragmenting central authority and introducing more intergovernmental competition and checks and balances. It is viewed as a way to make government more responsive and ef � cient. Technological changes have also made it somewhat easier than before to provide public services (like electricity and water supply) relatively ef � ciently in smaller market areas, and the lower levels of government have now a greater ability to handle certain tasks. In a world of rampant ethnic con � icts and separatist movements, decentralization is also regarded as a way of diffusing social and political tensions and ensuring local cultural and political autonomy. These potential bene � ts of decentralization have attracted a very diverse range