This paper advances the concept of budgetary space for health, which explores resources available for health that are generated through higher public expenditure, better budget allocations, and through improved public financial management (PFM). The budget decomposition approach presented in the paper provides insight into the extent to which each factor drives expansion in budgetary space for health.

The approach is applied to 133 low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) between 2000–2017 and finds that around 70% of budgetary space for health is driven by changes in overall public expenditure,

In 2019, WHO organized a webinar series of public financial management (PFM) in health issues. The series included six sessions on key PFM topics – from budget formulation, to budget execution and monitoring  – and involved a range of well-established experts from WHO, World Bank, OECD, International Budget Partnership and Results for Development, as well as country experts from health and finance authorities.

Abstract

The way governments manage resources through the budget cycle has important implications for health policy and whether governments achieve societal objectives such as efficiency, equity, quality, and accountability. Studies found a positive association between health service delivery outcomes and good governance of public finance; however, the mechanisms through which public financial management affects service delivery remain under-explored.

As countries increasingly focus on meeting the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), attention is often focused on the financing gap governments face in meeting their commitments. Not enough questions are being asked about governments’ capacity to effectively manage and spend the resources that they already have – or say they have. In this paper, researchers use a recent dataset to look at how “credible” government budgets are across the world – by “credible” we mean the extent to which actual spending matches the approved budget – and,

This note summarizes key findings from various country case studies, as well as implications and messages emerging from the health budget structure work developed by WHO Department of Health Systems Governance and Financing.

Additional resources related to health budgeting have been compiled here.