A direct relationship should exists between consistency and compliance of Government Agencies with the development agenda a nation adopts, and the level of socio-economic development it attains for public spending to be effective. The level of socio-economic development in Nigeria over the past decade has not been in tandem with the distributive outcome targets set by the 2004 reforms despite the continuous scaling up of funding in two key sectors (education and health). The study employed a welfare distribution analysis conducting several dominance tests to ascertain who has benefited from public spending in these sectors and found that apart from public primary education and healthcare for urban residents, no other level of social service was absolutely progressive generally, by gender or by location with tertiary level of both services regressive in 2010. These results weren’t better than the results of 2004 before these sectoral reforms. The study recommends that strengthening policies should be followed by institutional intensification and other several interrelated areas to attain effectiveness of public spending.
