Pro-poor budgets tend to achieve two things: 1) they tend to invest in public goods that
generate long-run returns that benefit both the poor and the rich. These include research and
development (R&D) investments, public education, and infrastructural investments; 2) they
tend to invest in ways that help the very poor households overcome persistent asset
constraints, thereby creating opportunities to exit entrenched poverty traps. These may also
include well-targeted safety nets such as the Food Security Pack to address poverty and food
insecurity and the Social Cash Transfer Scheme to help the most destitute, incapacitated and
poor households to enable them meet basic needs. Unfortunately, these critical preconditions
have been given little consideration as the focus in Zambia has been on aggregate growth
rather than the substance of spending.
The main objective of this paper was to examine and unpack the distributional effects of
current government spending and to highlight ways in which spending could be redirected to
achieve superior poverty reduction and welfare outcomes.