A spatially sensitive approach to understanding the impact of public expenditure on social exclusion

Abstract

Efforts by Australian governments to restructure the welfare state since the 1990s have included the development of a plethora of performance indicators tied to the outputs of social programs. Performance measures can be misleading because they tend to be limited in their assessments to the target group. Social outcomes generated by public expenditure that are not related to the role and tasks of the agency services, tend not to be measured or are under reported. For example, the performance of state sponsored literacy programs can be measured by how well children learn in schools but the flow on effects of a more literate community and the social and economic implications thereof are rarely examined. Moreover, social welfare performance indicators do not consider the equity implications of gross and net public expenditure. That is, governments may spend money in a given area to achieve social outcomes but also tax the same community in ways which moderate the effectiveness of social programs. This paper reports on a project that aims to deploy geographical information systems (GIS) to investigate these processes. The equity implications of gross and net public expenditure are considered in a discussion of the development of a process to map the impact of public expenditure on social exclusion.