Written By: Muhammad Dayyan, M.Ec
Abstract
Governments provide a host of goods and services to their citizens
to achieve various socio-economic objectives. Such spending is done through
various programs that include social security, education, infrastructure,
healthcare and economic programs. Several conventional approaches for measuring
efficiency of government expenditure have been proposed in the literature. Most
of these measures are quantitative in nature. For government spending based on
Shari’ah oriented public policy (al-Siyasah al-Shar’iyyah), which is value
loaded, there is a need for a complementary qualitative yardstick to measure
whether such spending achieves Maqasid al-Shari’ah. The present study has made
use of content analysis to develop a Maqasid Performance Pairwise Matrix
(MPPM), as one of the tools of Islamic oriented public policy (al-Siyasah
al-Shar’iyyah); this is to measure the public perception on government
expenditure in eight areas in Aceh and the extent to which the expenditure
conforms to Maqasid al-Shari’ah. MPPM was used as an instrument to survey 233
respondents in Aceh. The data from the survey were validated analyzed using
SPSS version 18.0. The findings from the study were found to be mixed.
Government spending in Aceh for Education and Healthcare achieved results at
the level of Complements (Hajiyat), beyond the basic need (Daruriyat). However,
in the other six areas, which include economics, public services and housing,
government spending was only able to satisfy the basic needs of the Acehnese.
The study concludes with recommendations and suggestions for future research.
Keyword: Government
expenditure, Maqasid al-Shari’ah, Maqasid Performance Pairwise Matrix (MPPM),
public perception and al-Siyasah al-Shar’iyyah
