Does government expenditure affect poverty, health, and education?

Economists have talked about government expenditure and its relation with poverty, health, and education from decades ago. Indeed, many theories and empirical evidence have been conducted since then. This study aims to evaluate relationship between one type of government spending, Special Autonomy Fund (SAF), and poverty, health, and education indicators in Aceh province, Indonesia, using panel dataset of 30 provinces in 2002-2018 period. Synthetic Control Method (SCM) is used as the model, since it is commonly applied to the cases of policy intervention in comparative case studies. This paper discovers that the SAF lowers poverty rate, escalate access to safe sanitation, and improve net enrollment ratio of senior secondary school. Nevertheless, there is no prominent association between SAF allocation and access to safe water.