New report: Public expenditures, development and inequality in Uganda

On behalf of the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Vista Analyse have completed an analysis of public efforts to mitigate inequality in Uganda, co-authored by Statistics Norway. The great economic growth of the country the last decades provide the backdrop of the analysis, and the report assesses whether the growth has been accompanied by a reduction in the gap between the rich and the poor in Uganda. The analysis focuses on public expenditures within health and education, as these sectors are endorsed by the research literature as the main budgetary tools for inequality mitigation.

At the core of our method is a model that assesses the process of public efforts to mitigate inequality from policy decision to desired outcome. The model seeks to identify which factors that may lead to insufficient efforts to mitigate inequality, as well as mechanisms that may jeopardize how these efforts translate to outcomes at the citizen level. A diverse selection of data was applied to give our analysis empirical backing, including the development over time in key indicators of health and education, as well as interviews with experts on economic policy in Uganda. The model is developed so that it may be employed for similar analyses of other countries.

Results of the analysis show that Uganda is prioritizing inequality mitigation to a lesser extent than before, with both health and education spending as shares of GDP decreasing the last twenty years. When these budget shares are adjusted for population growth, education seems to be prioritized more than health. When assessing health and education indicators over time, we discover improvements in concerns such as illiteracy and child mortality, but the improvements in both sectors are small compared to what could have been achieved through sufficient efforts to mitigate inequality by the Ugandan government.

Read the report here (in Norwegian).