to associate degrees and certifications from the institutions providing this level of schooling. Government expenditure in public education is considered an in-kind transfer because the service can be accessed by all school-age children regardless of socioeconomic background.

Expenditures on health also increased in the period 2017–21, accounting for 7 percent of annual government expenditure as of 2018 (figure 16, Appendix A3). In this paper, funds spent by the government in the health sector amount to in-kind transfers to the public because these services are available to all. Citizens, residents, and visitors can freely access the services in the public health system with no differentiation in fees<sup>6</sup> according to income level or socioeconomic class.

In addition to the in-kind transfers in education and health, the government implemented a social protection system within the SEED program. The program targeted school-age children, people with disabilities, the elderly, the chronically ill, pregnant women, lactating mothers, and the adult poor. Beneficiaries are selected via proxy means testing, which uses household characteristics such as age, household size, marital status, assets, disability, and housing conditions as indicators or “proxies” to determine household expenditure or consumption. Cash is transferred to households: in 2017, it was EC$300 per month or EC$3,600 per annum. In 2018, the amount given to elderly households was increased by EC$100 per month, and in 2022, the government raised the amount paid to all beneficiaries by EC$150 per month. Government annual expenditure on SEED increased from EC$14 million in 2017 to approximately EC$18 million in 2021 and is expected to have increased further in 2022. From 2017 to 2021, the government spent an average of EC$2.9 million per year on the school feeding program.

# **3. Data Sources**

The primary data source is the Survey of Living Conditions and Household Budgets (SLCHBS) conducted by the Central Statistical Office (CSO), the country’s national statistics office, between April and May of 2018–19. This survey encompassed a sample of approximately 1,689 households. The primary objective of this questionnaire was to collect information related to household socioeconomic and living conditions as well as the household budget in order to construct the consumption variable (as the survey did not collect income information), data that are crucial for measuring poverty in Grenada. It should be noted that this survey did not gather information regarding pensions received or any social security contributions, neither by individuals nor the government. The survey comprised two distinct parts, one focusing on household conditions and another for obtaining individual characteristics of each household member. The person interviewed was one adult member (older than 18 years old), though the survey collected information on every single household member.<sup>7</sup> The use of administrative data on taxable wages for the PIT complements the survey information. The source of this data set was the Inland Revenue Division (IRD), a division within Grenada's Ministry of Finance (MOF). This data set covers wages for different workers and is disaggregated into two parts: the estimation of the share of the wage allocated for pension funds, and the other being the gross income, which is the taxable part of the wage received.

> 6 Fees are waived for some services provided to children, the elderly, and the indigent. All fees and co-payments were not included in the analysis given the low amounts reported in the SLCHBS of 2017–18.

> 7 To evaluate the accuracy of the data for fiscal interventions, a macroeconomic validation is presented in Appendix B3.

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