Unauthorised municipal expenditure in South Africa: a spatial perspective

Over the last few years, municipal audits in South Africa have shown irregular expenditure amounting to billions of rands. A recent article by the Geospatial Analytics Unit at the HSRC demonstrated how spatial statistics techniques can be used to indicate hot spots and cold spots, which depict municipal patterns of unauthorised expenditure. This type of mapping and spatial analysis highlights trends and produces information that may inform future predictions or policy and interventions to curb unauthorised expenditure. The techniques could also be applied to other data in the public domain, to demonstrate how key issues affect the country.