Quality of public expenditure and educational budget management in Cajamarca, Peru

Introduction: Evaluating budget execution is essential to ensure efficient management of public resources and improve educational quality in the Cajamarca region. Objective: To analyze the quality of public spending and educational budget management in Cajamarca, Peru. Methodology: A quantitative, descriptive approach was applied, with a non-experimental, cross-sectional design. The sample included 105 workers from the technical teams of the budget programs. A validated questionnaire was used as the data collection technique. The analysis was performed using SPSS v27 and Excel. Results: Sixty percent of workers are between 26 and 36 years old, and 87.62% are under the Contratación Administrativa de Servicios (CAS, Administrative Service Contract) regime. Only 31.3% consider the budget sufficient to carry out planned activities, and 34.9% perceive monitoring as almost adequate. Discussion: The findings reveal weaknesses in budget programming, allocation, and monitoring, coinciding with studies that show the limited efficiency of Results-Based Budgeting (RBB) in regions with low management capacity. Conclusions: Budget planning needs to be strengthened, monitoring mechanisms improved, and technical staff trained to achieve more efficient spending and higher quality education in Cajamarca.