Benefit Incidence Analysis

Benefit incidence analysis (BIA) assesses how the benefits of public spending on services such as education, health and subsidies are distributed across population groups, typically ranked by income or consumption. It combines data on who uses publicly provided services, drawn from household surveys, with the unit cost or subsidy the government provides per user, to estimate how much of total public spending each group captures. The result reveals whether public expenditure is progressive — favouring the poor — or regressive, and is a standard tool for analysing the distributional fairness of fiscal policy.