Public financial management and health service delivery

This report reviews, synthesises and critically discusses the findings of the existing academic literature on the
potential and actual contributions of public financial management (PFM) systems and PFM reforms to improving the effectiveness of health service delivery.
We describe the current state of the evidence on the link between PFM quality and health service delivery and add a judgment on the strength of this evidence. We review both the theoretical literature, which provides hypotheses
on the impact of various aspects of PFM quality on health service delivery, and the empirical literature, which we use to scrutinise the validity of the hypothesised links.

We have restricted our review search to Englishlanguage publications (including peer-reviewed as well as unpublished texts) from the period 1996-2016, searching biomedical and economics databases as well as Google Scholar.