Using models to cost government policies and programmes in South Africa

The purpose of costing new and existing government programmes is to mobilise and systematise information to present different options for how to move forward. There has always been a need for such information, and this need will remain, given the imperatives to improve the use of government funds to meet social needs. It is therefore important to build capacity in government to do costing studies, and to use costing information in policy-making and management processes.

This paper explores the history of policy costing in South Africa. It shows how the experience gained from the early policy costing projects fed into the methodology for Spending Reviews developed by the Government Technical Advisory Centre (GTAC) in 2013. It then documents key methodological lessons learned from our experience with costing policies. The paper ends with a few observations regarding the outlook for policy costing in South Africa.