Realising MDGs require an increase in the budgetary allocations as in the last few years, the allocations to education and health have declined and at present the public sector expenditure on these activities is just 1.7 and 0.6 percent of the GDP.
PIDE director Dr A.R. Kemal expressed these views at a workshop on 'Poverty and MDGs Monitoring' at a local hotel on Wednesday.
He stressed that attainment of Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) require a sharp increase in the expenditure on the social sector whereas PRSP proposes only a marginal increase.
The three-day workshop included a half-day workshop for the parliamentarians with the objective of increasing their awareness about the MDGs and poverty monitoring in Pakistan.
In his address on Budget Allocations and Efficiency and the MDGs, Kemal added that MDGs attainment will require scaling up the quantity and quality of social services, in addition to general interventions such as infrastructure development - all of which require financial resources.
He said that merely an increase in the public expenditure would not suffice, adding such was the experience in the case of the Social Action Programme in the 90's.
As Pakistan is promoting the public-private partnership, Kemal cautioned, the government should ensure that that the private sector education was affordable, otherwise MDGs targets may not be achieved.
Further in his presentation, the PIDE director stated that since the social sectors are in the domain of the provincial governments and now the district governments, there is need for estimates of various MDG indicators for provinces and the districts which require much more resources.
Continuing, he pointed out that for improving efficiency, it was absolutely necessary that the development and non-development budgets are co-ordinated.
In regard to improving the allocations, Dr Kemal noted that overall allocation of resources for development was determined by the ministry for finance, where overriding considerations are the resource position and the targeted fiscal deficit.
"Thus, because of the other pressing needs, the resources allocated to the social sector are relatively smaller."
Similarly, he added, the provinces too have relatively less money for the development projects for they have to bear the current costs.
"Instead of determining the optimal allocations to achieve the desired targets, the allocations are based on the projects and priority accorded to them by the line ministry, the finance division and the Planning Commission."
Continuing, Kemal said that there was hardly any zero-budgeting method for determining needs of the different sectors and the allocations are based on the previous year's utilisation.
He further noted that there was hardly any outcome orientation in the existing budgetary processes and hardly any public expenditure reviews. "The auditing procedures too do not result in efficiency outcomes, nor is there any provision for performance auditing," he said.
In short, Dr Kemal suggested outcome-and MDG-orientation needs to enter the budgetary formulation process. "This orientation should influence the allocation of social-sector budgets across sectors (eg health, education, water & sanitation, etc); within each sector (eg primary versus secondary health facilities, primary versus secondary schooling) and across provinces and districts.
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