The relative progressivity of social services in Ecuador

This article examines the incidence of public subsidies to health and educa tion services in Ecuador In Ecuador; health and education services are the only public expenditures that consciously attempt to redistribute welfare t o the poor: The methods combine demand estimates from the willingness-to-pa y literature with welfare dominance tests, allowing a comparison of the sta ndard benefit incidence analysis with the more sophisticated demand estimat es. The results give a clear progressivity ordering for the public services examined: primary school subsidies are the most progressive, followed by h ealth consultations for children, health consultations for adults and secon dary education (which an statistically indistinguishable), and subsidies fo r tertiary education. Of these, only the first two have a significant impac t on the distribution of per capita expenditure, inclusive of benefits. The se results are remarkably consistent across the methods used.