Reconstructing public expenditure data: Use of classification systems to better measure public spending in agriculture — a Mozambique case study:

This paper on Mozambique is part of a set of four country case studies that take a detailed look at public expenditures in agriculture, and at how the data on expenditures are captured in government financial and budget accounts. The objective of these studies is to unpack the “black box†of country-level public expenditure statistics reported in various cross-country datasets and ultimately to enable the use of existing government accounts and their classification and coding systems to identify levels and compositions of government agriculture expenditures, with a better understanding of what these data are in fact accounting for. This Mozambique case study finds that the administrative classification of public expenditures and budgets should be used as the primary source for reconstructing public expenditures in agriculture, because it offers the richest and most detailed disaggregation of spending data. However, it needs to be complemented by the use of Mozambique’s programmatic classification of expenditures—while this categorization is less detailed, it is necessary in order to identify sources of agricultural spending that emanate from agencies not primarily mandated to support the sector. Our reconstructed agricultural expenditure figures suggest that existing reported figures may underestimate the true total amount of public resources going to the agricultural sector.