Total expenditures are the sum of direct expenditures and intergovernmental expenditures and represent final sector expenditures. All sector expenditures can be broken down into recurrent expenditures used to pay for wages and salaries to employees, purchase goods and services, pay for repairs, utilities, etc., and capital outlay expenditures including spending on capital repairs, purchase of fixed assets, land, etc.

The education and healthcare expenditure figures can be further broken down by sub-functions and rayons. To align better the BOOST/Treasury data with the information available in the Household Budget Survey for Moldova, the analysis allocates regionally disaggregated sectoral spending to custom variables, following the logic of the survey. Each variable in Table 6 can be briefly summarized as follows:

- “ **Health: in-hospitals** ”: the category covers government spending on in-patient care. The category generally includes government spending on in-patient care services provided in rayons, as well as general and specialized inpatient care services provided in the Municipality of Chisinau. About 63% of overall in-patient care expenditures took place in the capital city, being driven primarily by the budgets of in-patient care providers of republican significance (e.g. national hospitals, institutes, etc.).

- “ **Health: out-of-hospitals** ”: the category is comprised of government spending on several budget sub-functions, namely – “30 Outpatient specialist care”, “31 Laboratories/diagnostics”, “40 Outpatient primary care”, “41 Home care”, and “70 Emergency care”. About 48% of overall combined expenditures on these sub-functions were spent in the Municipality of Chisinau, largely due to the providers of national significance located in the capital of the country.

- “ **Education: preschool** ”: the variable captures government spending on pre-school education institutions. About 27% of expenditures on pre-school education in 2017 were spent in the Municipality of Chisinau, mainly due to the greater number of preschoolers residing within the boundaries of the municipality.

- “ **Education: school”** : the category captures government spending on primary schools, gymnasiums and lyceums. When combined, these categories can be used as a proxy of school education in Moldova (i.e. grades I- XII), for children from about 7 to 18 years old.

- “ **Education: after school (below university)** ”:  the variable is comprised of government spending on vocational and jobs schools, as well as colleges.

- “ **Education: university** ”: this variable includes government spending on higher education institutions.

The latter two categories cannot be regionally disaggregated. Since almost all higher education institutions are located in the capital of the country and other big cities, we allocated them to receivers ate the national level.

It should also be noted that not all sector expenditures from the BOOST datasets were allocated to the variables identified in the survey. In the case of education, for example, about 9% of overall local government spending on education has not been attributed to any of the variables. Most of the unallocated spending consists of administrative expenditures and other un-allocable items (i.e. capital investments in health care).

The information presented in Table 6 focuses on 2017, the most recent year for which relevant regionally disaggregated sectoral expenditure data were publicly available<sup>5</sup> when the study was carried out. Since the detailed regionally disaggregated health expenditure data was available only for 2016, the analysis adjusted the regional composition of spending by sub-functions to match the NHIC’s annual budget execution statements for 2017.

> 5 In other words, the more recent year for which BOOST data for Moldova were available.

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