Unpacking the ‘Black Box’ of Public Expenditure Data in Africa: Quantification of Agricultural Spending Using Mozambique’s Budget Reports
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2018-009Keywords:
public expenditure, budget, financial data, agriculture, government spending, MozambiqueAbstract
This paper undertakes a detailed examination of the availability and quality of data on public expenditures in agriculture in Africa. We consider the case of Mozambique, a country characterised by low income and low administrative capacity, but also by a policy environment that has turned a focused lens on public funding to agriculture. We explore the extent to which domestic analysts may be able to access and use such data to reliably quantify public resource allocation to the sector, and to unpack the ‘black box’ of what goes into country-level public expenditure statistics. We find that data are, surprisingly, freely available in great abundance. This has encouraging aspects but also pitfalls: On the one hand, data that are often out of public sight are openly accessible for Mozambican researchers to draw upon. But the drawback of high abundance emanates from its manifestation in the form of a proliferation of multiple classification systems used to create a fine disaggregation of public funds data; given Mozambique’s limited public sector capacity, this has meant that each classification system leaves a lot to be desired, making it hard to use any single one to accurately and fully reliably reconstruct the amount of public resources going to agriculture. Making the hard choice to eliminate some of the classification systems, and dedicate this freed-up capacity to be more thorough on the retained ones, would better serve domestic users of such data, as well as the government, which is both a consumer and producer of these data.
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2018 The Author(s)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms. If a submission is rejected or withdrawn prior to publication, all rights return to the author(s):
-
Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
-
Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
-
Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work.
Submitting to the journal implicitly confirms that all named authors and rights holders have agreed to the above terms of publication. It is the submitting author's responsibility to ensure all authors and relevant institutional bodies have given their agreement at the point of submission.
Note: some institutions require authors to seek written approval in relation to the terms of publication. Should this be required, authors can request a separate licence agreement document from the editorial team (e.g. authors who are Crown employees).