PEFA, Public Financial Management, and Good Governance
PEFA, Public Financial Management, and Good Governance

Author: Jens Kromann Kristensen

Publisher: World Bank Publications

Published: 2019-11-24

Total Pages: 168

ISBN-13: 146481466X

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This project, based on the Public Expenditure and Financial Accountability (PEFA) data set, researched how PEFA can be used to shape policy development in public financial management (PFM) and other major relevant policy areas such as anticorruption, revenue mobilization, political economy analysis, and fragile states. The report explores what shapes the PFM system in low- and middle-income countries by examining the relationship between political institutions and the quality of the PFM system. Although the report finds some evidence that multiple political parties in control of the legislature is associated with better PFM performance, the report finds the need to further refine and test the theories on the relationship between political institutions and PFM. The report addresses the question of the outcomes of PFM systems, distinguishing between fragile and nonfragile states. It finds that better PFM performance is associated with more reliable budgets in terms of expenditure composition in fragile states, but not aggregate budget credibility. Moreover, in contrast to existing studies, it finds no evidence that PFM quality matters for deficit and debt ratios, irrespective of whether a country is fragile or not. The report also explores the relationship between perceptions of corruption and PFM performance. It finds strong evidence of a relationship between better PFM performance and improvements in perceptions of corruption. It also finds that PFM reforms associated with better controls have a stronger relationship with improvements in perceptions of corruption compared to PFM reforms associated with more transparency. The last chapter looks at the relationship between PEFA indicators for revenue administration and domestic resource mobilization. It focuses on the credible use of penalties for noncompliance as a proxy for the type of political commitment required to improve tax performance. The analysis shows that countries that credibly enforce penalties for noncompliance collect more taxes on average.

Republic of Iraq Public Expenditure Review
Republic of Iraq Public Expenditure Review

Author:

Publisher: World Bank Publications

Published: 2014-08-22

Total Pages: 175

ISBN-13: 1464802947

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Republic of Iraq Public Expenditure Review: Toward More Efficient Spending for Better Service Delivery provides an integrated perspective on how Iraq needs to provide better public service delivery while maintaining macroeconomic stability and fiscal discipline. These goals exist amid a challenging context of revenue volatility, the need to diversify the economy, weak accountability mechanisms, and residual conflict. Reflecting these challenges, key socioeconomic developmental indicators are stalled or are even declining despite rapid growth in public spending. Growth in spending has not been matched by absorptive capacity, let alone improved outcomes. The difficult task of encouraging fiscal institutions to embed practices of good economic management remains a work in progress. The task for Iraqi authorities will be to turn oil revenues into sustained welfare improvements. Macroeconomic stability alone is not enough to address social and economic development issues and to avoid a 'resource curse'. Economic diversification is imperative for the goals of creating jobs and promoting income-generating opportunities for the Iraqi population. In the years ahead, Iraqi government authorities will have the following key challenges: - to remove constraints to nonhydrocarbon economic activities, - to ensure the effi cient use of oil revenue, and - to restrain the growth of current spending to free up resources for public investment, while maintaining essential safety nets and social support for the poor and disadvantaged. Senior policymakers at the Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Planning, and line ministries have the opportunity to take concrete steps now. As economic growth prospects are favorable in the medium term, the Iraqi government needs to lay the foundations of a broadly diversified economy and to provide decent public services and security while facilitating adequate economic freedom.

Republic of Iraq Public Expenditure Review
Republic of Iraq Public Expenditure Review

Author: The World Bank

Publisher: World Bank Publications

Published: 2014-08-26

Total Pages: 175

ISBN-13: 1464802955

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This Public Expenditure Review (PER) provides an integrated perspective on Iraq’s need to provide better public service delivery, while maintaining macroeconomic stability and fiscal discipline. The achievement of these objectives unfolds within a challenging context of revenue volatility, the need to diversify the economy, weak accountability mechanisms, and residual conflict. Reflecting these challenges, key socio-economic developmental indicators are stalled or even declining despite rapid growth in public spending. Indeed, the review shows that growth in spending has not been matched by absorptive capacity, let alone improved outcomes. The difficult task of constructing the fiscal institutions to embed the practices of good economic management remains a work-in-progress. The PER is one component of World Bank assistance to the government to improve public expenditure policy and management. The challenge for the Iraqi authorities in the years ahead will be to turn oil revenues into sustained welfare improvements. Macroeconomic stability alone is not enough to address social and economic development issues and to avoid a resource curse. Iraq’s oil wealth alone cannot generate sustainably high living standards for the majority of its population. Economic diversification is an imperative—both to create jobs and to promote income-generating opportunities for the Iraqi population. The key challenges for the authorities therefore are (i) to remove constraints to non-hydrocarbon economic activities; (ii) to ensure the efficient use of oil revenue; and (iii) to restrain the growth of current spending (in particular wage bill and subsidies) to free up resources for public investment, while maintaining essential safety nets and social support for the poor and disadvantaged. Public investment management is a crosscutting capability that is needed to meet Iraq’s development objectives. The government has the opportunity to take concrete steps now. The PER proposes approaches and actions to better use Iraq’s oil revenues by shifting to a save and invest via curbing inefficient spending and redirecting resources to public investment and basic services. As economic growth prospects are favorable in the medium-term, the Iraqi government has the opportunity to lay the foundations of a broadly diversified economy, with a reasonable footprint that provides decent public services and security while facilitating adequate economic freedom. Senior policy makers at the Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Planning and line ministries are the primary audience of this work.

The Economics of Iraq
The Economics of Iraq

Author: Amer K. Hirmis

Publisher: Grosvenor House Publishing

Published: 2018-03-12

Total Pages: 580

ISBN-13: 1999824121

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Meticulously researched and written by Dr Amer K. Hirmis the book takes readers 6000 years back to early Mesopotamian polity, culture, and religious codes which shaped the economy, and continue to shape much of the body of Iraq's polity, economy and society today. Economic inefficiency, inequality and lack of sufficient employment are common threads that run throughout Mesopotamian/Iraqi economic history. The persistence of poverty, high unemployment, conscious discrimination against women, and a polity dictating blind allegiance and obedience from the subjects to the ruler, denied the Iraqis achieving economic development, the ultimate aim of which is the sustained improvement of the well-being of the people. Even when economic growth was attained, it was desperately non-inclusive. With a novel approach to economic development, this book examines Iraq's economy over the past 100 years. It establishes the historical roots in the consumption patterns, nature of the producers, the economic structure, trade, monetary and fiscal policy and resource allocation. In all these areas the echoes from the ancient past are striking. The principles of Sumerian taxes are still applied in present-day Iraq. The book proposes a set of conditions, which will need to be created for Iraq to achieve economic development and functional democracy, in the distant future.

Public Financial Management Reform in the Middle East and North Africa
Public Financial Management Reform in the Middle East and North Africa

Author: Robert P. Beschel, Jr.

Publisher: World Bank Publications

Published: 2012-05-31

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 0821395300

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This report combines a comparative cross-country analysis using Public Expenditure and Financial Accountability (PEFA) data along with individual country case studies to examine the relative strengths and weaknesses of public financial management practices in the Middle East and North

Securing Development
Securing Development

Author: Bernard Harborne

Publisher: World Bank Publications

Published: 2017-03-01

Total Pages: 334

ISBN-13: 1464807671

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Securing Development: Public Finance and the Security Sector highlights the role of public finance in the delivery of security and criminal justice services. This book offers a framework for analyzing public financial management, financial transparency, and oversight, as well as expenditure policy issues that determine how to most appropriately manage security and justice services. The interplay among security, justice, and public finance is still a relatively unexplored area of development. Such a perspective can help security actors provide more professional, effective, and efficient security and justice services for citizens, while also strengthening systems for accountability. The book is the result of a project undertaken jointly by staff from the World Bank and the United Nations, integrating the disciplines where each institution holds a comparative advantage and a core mandate. The primary audience includes government officials bearing both security and financial responsibilities, staff of international organizations working on public expenditure management and security sector issues, academics, and development practitioners working in an advisory capacity.

Liberia
Liberia

Author: International Monetary Fund. Fiscal Affairs Dept.

Publisher: International Monetary Fund

Published: 2012-09-18

Total Pages: 100

ISBN-13: 1475510640

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At the request of the Government of Liberia (GoL), the IMF Fiscal Affairs Department (FAD) led an external assessment of the central government’s public financial management (PFM) systems based on the Public Expenditure and Financial Accountability (PEFA) methodology. The assessment was undertaken in close collaboration with the Ministry of Finance’s (MoF) PFM Reform Coordination Unit (RCU), with the participation of staff of the African Development Bank and the World Bank, and with financial support from the European Union and Sida. The assessment examines progress since the PEFA assessment of 2007 and provides a renewed baseline for monitoring progress in PFM reform and for supporting the GoL in refining, where necessary, the current PFM reform strategy. The assessment snapshot date was April 23, 2012. The report was reviewed by the GoL, the PEFA Secretariat, a donor reference group, and FAD, the latter being at the same time responsible for quality assurance.

Public Expenditure Analysis
Public Expenditure Analysis

Author: World Bank

Publisher: World Bank Publications

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 294

ISBN-13: 9780821361443

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Focuses on the public sector in developing countries. Provides tools of analysis for discovering equity in tax burdens as well as in public spending and judging government performance in its role in safeguarding the interests of the poor and disadvantaged. Outlines a framework for a rights-based approach to citizen empowerment - in other words, creating an institutional design with appropriate rules, restraints, and incentives to make the public sector responsive and accountable to an average voter.

The Occupation of Iraq: Volume 2
The Occupation of Iraq: Volume 2

Author: Stefan Talmon

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2013-02-08

Total Pages: 1572

ISBN-13: 1782250174

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The invasion and occupation of Iraq rank among the most controversial and complex issues in international law in recent history. This volume of documents covers the occupation of Iraq from the planning stages of the invasion of Iraq in early 2002 to the transfer of governing authority to the Iraqi Interim Government on 28 June 2004. The book presents 595 selected documents including the first complete set of all Regulations, Orders, Memoranda and Public Notices issued by the US-led occupation administration of Iraq, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), several of which were never published on the CPA`s website or promulgated in Alwaqai Aliraqiya, the Official Gazette of Iraq. Some of these legal acts have shaped the economic and political system of present day Iraq and will be part of the country`s legal order for years to come. The book also includes some 120 other CPA and CPA-related documents selected from more than 5000 unclassified CPA documents and received under freedom of information requests lodged in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and Switzerland. These documents include instructions and proclamations to the Iraqi people in the early stages of the occupation, organizational charts, internal legal opinions, diplomatic notes, international agreements concluded by the CPA with other States, and numerous internal memoranda for the head of the CPA, Ambassador Paul L Bremer, on legal, diplomatic and political issues. The book also presents for the first time all 235 resolutions passed by the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) between July 2003 and June 2004. The resolutions as well as many of the 25 other important IGC documents (including various political statements, press releases and decrees of the Council`s Higher National De-Ba`athification Commission) have been translated from Arabic and are presented here for the first time in English. These documents are complemented by the relevant United Nations documents on the occupation of Iraq as well as some 50 policy documents of the United States, the United Kingdom and the Iraqi opposition movement as well as all relevant fatwas (religious rulings) of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani which shaped the internal Iraqi political process during the occupation. This collection archives these important documents for future use and makes them easily accessible to researchers and professionals. Considering that the main source of information for the occupying powers in Iraq were the precedents set during the First and Second World Wars, the occupation of Iraq will serve as a modern precedent for future administrations of occupied territory. The documents are made easily accessible by a comprehensive table of documents, a list of abbreviations, more than 1100 explanatory notes and cross-references and a substantive subject index. This volume is the second on The Occupation of Iraq. It is complemented by a monograph by the same author which, on the basis of the documents collection, presents a comprehensive analysis of The Governance of Occupied Territory in Contemporary International Law.