No.48 General Budget Support in Tanzania, Late Disbursement and Service Delivery

The actual flow of General Budget Support (GBS) is not well known in developing countries.There have been few empirical studies on the effect of late disbursement from donors to a recipient government and from the central government to local governments. This paper attempts to analyze this flow by focusing on donors’ GBS disbursement to Tanzania and on the intergovernmental money flows in Tanzania. This paper shows that such center-local transfers are significantly correlated with the timing of local government expenditures in general and health expenditures in particular. It also shows that development expenditures are more affected than recurrent expenditures by delays in the transfer. To improve service delivery on the ground,the transfers from donors to the central government and from the central government to local governments need to be timely.

Keywords: General Budget Support, late disbursement, service delivery, performance ratio,local government