Efficiency of social spending in Togo: an overview

What is it about?

Togo has initiated a major fiscal consolidation since 2017. So far, the adjustment has relied heavily on capital expenditure cuts and recurrent expenditure containment. In this context, preserving public social spending and achieving better social outcomes are essential. Closing some efficiency gaps in health and education sectors could help the task of fiscal consolidation. This Selected Issues Papers (SIP) provides an overview of Togo’s public spending in health and education sectors and assesses the associated input and output technical efficiencies using a frontier analysis. We find that in general, Togo’s social performances are below those of selected countries with similar development stage. With the current spending levels, Togo can improve its health and education outcomes by 4.8 percent and 6.3 percent respectively. In addition, the spending leakages, of about 10 percent and 14 percent respectively in the two sectors, could be reduced to maximize the impact of social spending. Achieving these efficiency gains will require a series of structural reforms over the medium term in the health and education sectors.

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