Increasing public spending in sectors such as education and healthcare is often presented as the natural response to the structural crises undermining them. Yet reality repeatedly challenges this convenient belief in budgetary efficiency: ever-higher allocations do not automatically lead to better-performing services.
Behind the billions injected into these systems often lie mechanisms of chronic inefficiency, where spending replaces reform and budget volume is mistaken for service quality.
Citizens are no longer fooled. They continue to denounce failing schools, overcrowded hospitals and stark inequalities in access and quality. This paradox is far from cyclical. It reflects a deeper pathology in public policy: inefficient spending, not due to a lack of funds, but to weak governance. The money exists, but it dissipates through administrative complexity, poorly defined priorities, the absence of evaluation and a lack of managerial accountability.
Education: massive investment, weak returns
In most countries, education ranks among the most budget-intensive sectors. Governments rightly view it as a strategic investment, yet the returns on this spending remain alarmingly low. Each year, education ministries absorb a growing share of national budgets. The figures are striking: higher wages, new school construction, digital equipment programmes. And yet, in classrooms, the same symptoms persist—demotivated teachers, outdated curricula, deteriorating infrastructure and fragile learning outcomes.
The problem is not the amount of money injected, but the way it is dispersed. Pay rises overshadow training, bureaucracy takes precedence over pedagogy, and reform becomes a communication exercise rather than a genuine change in method. The result is a school system that consumes more than it transforms—a system that confuses spending with progress. Public education turns into an administrative ritual, where each reform seems to erase the previous one without ever addressing the root causes of qualitative decline.
Healthcare: when spending does not heal
The healthcare sector follows the same pattern. Hospital budgets are soaring and investment plans are multiplying, yet waiting lists are growing longer and medical staff are burning out. Public hospitals lack equipment, rural areas remain under-resourced, and preventive medicine continues to be the system’s poor relation.
This inefficiency stems from a vertical and fragmented governance model, incapable of ensuring coherence across different levels of care. Public procurement is often opaque, investments prioritise buildings over human resources, and reforms run up against institutional inertia. Citizens see the spending, but do not feel the service. Efficiency dissolves into complexity, while monitoring and evaluation—the cornerstone of any sound public policy—remains almost non-existent.
Public money “without a compass”?
The real issue, then, is not the scarcity of funds, but the absence of a strategic direction. Public money often circulates without a compass. Diagnoses exist, but their translation into coherent decisions remains partial. Policies are driven more by a logic of inputs than by results. Budgets are voted, spent, and then forgotten—without any real measurement of their impact on the ground.
This lack of accountability fuels mistrust. The state spends, citizens pay, but no one can say precisely what the money has achieved. This budgetary opacity, as much as resource constraints, undermines confidence in public action. Transparency and accountability are no longer technical options; they are democratic imperatives.
Spending better, not more
Efficiency cannot be decreed through budgetary legislation. It rests on clear objectives, rigorous monitoring, transparent choices and genuine accountability. In education as in healthcare, the challenge is to relearn how to spend wisely—not simply to spend more.
That means rethinking governance, strengthening independent evaluation and embedding a true culture of results. As long as the quality of public management fails to progress at the same pace as budgets, states will continue to pile billions onto ailing systems—without ever treating the underlying causes.
