Public Expenditure Tracking Surveys: Planning, Implementation and Uses

If social policies are to be effective, they need to be implemented. A key contributing factor to the success or failure of implementation is the way public sector funds are mobilized, allocated, and disbursed. This is widely recognized, as demonstrated by the wide range of studies analyzing public sector financing. Until relatively recently, attention was primarily focused on budgets and allocations while efforts were made to improve information systems and reporting. In the last decade, recognizing the poor quality of expenditure reporting, Public Expenditure Tracking Surveys (PETS) have been used to draw attention to whether funds are actually applied to their intended purposes. This study looks at a number of PETS studies that have been completed in the last decade and reviews the existing literature on these studies. It discusses how PETS have come to be defined, what makes them distinctive, and how they are used. The key purposes are to demonstrate how and why PETS are useful and suggest some ways to increase their usefulness.