Avaliação do desempenho do gasto público social de Honduras, El Salvador e Guatemala (2008-2017)

Abstract

The economy and public expenditure have been two important elements of study at present, because they are related. To understand them, it is necessary to intuit the existing relationships between their main units such as: State, government, nation, public policies, economic policy, budget and public expenditure. State institutions have played a fundamental role in the control of public policies, economic policy, and financial administration, regulating, and balancing the income and expenditure of the State, seeking the best performance. The requirements that have guided the evaluation of the economic performance of public social spending have sought as main purpose to generate progress and development for the countries, especially the improvement of the performance of the public social budget; therefore, in this research through the economic dimension, the behavior of the economic indicators of public social spending in the areas of health; education; citizen security; urbanization and public works; culture and sports of Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala from 2008 to 2017 was evaluated. To measure the economic performance, the following methodology was implemented: the data were relativized to units with value between 0 and 1 that facilitated its operation, an analysis of the data through Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to obtain the weights of the indexes, the calculation of the performance through the Economic Performance Index of Public Social Expenditure (IDEGPS) determined by the weights of the PCA and a validation of the results obtained using non-parametric verification. To evaluate the economic performance of public spending in these three countries, 21 economic indicators of public social spending were used, which were characterized in 5 areas of social spending in each of the countries. The main results of the economic evaluation of public spending for this period of time were the relevant characterization of the significant differences and similarities in performance found by areas between each year in each country and the significant differences in the areas between countries, finding that the highest performance of public social spending for some countries was concentrated in the areas of health, education, public safety and culture; however, some countries showed low performance in priority areas for social development such as health and education. This dissertation provides relevant quantitative and qualitative information on the economic performance of public social spending, the characterization of performance by areas and economic indicators, an IDEGPS measurement index that can be safely used to measure public performance, and the database used in this work is available.