Does Public Financial Management Save Life? Evidence from a Quantitative Review of PFM and Health Outcomes in Sub-Saharan African Countries.

Public financial management (PFM) theory suggests that improvements in the allocation, execution, and monitoring of public funds can result in improved sectoral outcomes, including in health. However, the existing literature on the relationship between PFM quality and health outcomes provides limited empirical documentation and insufficient explanation of the mechanics of that relationship. This paper contributes to the literature by estimating the correlation between PFM quality and health outcomes from a sample of sub-Saharan African countries over the period 2005-2018, using a pooled ordinary least squares (OLS) estimator.