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.
Managing Public Expenditure presents a comprehensive and in-depth analysis of all aspects of public expenditure management from the preparation of the budget to the execution, control and audit stages.
Public expenditure policy, together with efforts to raise revenue,is at the core of efficient and equitable adjustment. Public expenditureproductivity has critical implications for fiscal adjustment, particularly as the competition for limited public resources intensifies.By providing a framework for defining and analyzing public expenditureproductivity and unproductive expenditures, this pamphlet discusseshow economic policymakers may approach these issues.
Traditionally, economics training in public finances has focused more on tax than public expenditure issues, and within expenditure, more on policy considerations than the more mundane matters of public expenditure management. For many years, the IMF's Public Expenditure Management Division has answered specific questions raised by fiscal economists on such missions. Based on this experience, these guidelines arose from the need to provide a general overview of the principles and practices observed in three key aspects of public expenditure management: budget preparation, budget execution, and cash planning. For each aspect of public expenditure management, the guidelines identify separately the differing practices in four groups of countries - the francophone systems, the Commonwealth systems, Latin America, and those in the transition economies. Edited by Barry H. Potter and Jack Diamond, this publication is intended for a general fiscal, or a general budget, advisor interested in the macroeconomic dimension of public expenditure management.
This is a comprehensive manual, based on a sound conceptual foundation but with a deliberate operational thrust, covering the entire public expenditure management cycle--from multiyear expenditure programming and budget formulation through budget execution, audit, and evaluation.
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.
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.
The government budget should be the financial mirror of society's choices. Yet most people view budgeting as the epitome of eye-glazing subjects, rarely explained in a way that is understandable to the non-specialist and too often presented without adequate consideration of a country’s governance and institutional capacity. Government Budgeting and Expenditure Management fills a gap in the literature to redress these failings and does so in comparative international perspective. This book provides a comprehensive but pithy and easy-to-understand treatment of public financial management, taking into account a variety of special issues including budgeting in post-conflict situations, at subnational government levels, for military/security expenditures, and in countries with large extractive revenues. Distilling the lessons of budgeting reform in countries at different levels of income and administrative capacity, each chapter gradually progresses from the basic principles to the more technical aspects and then on to implementation issues, using concrete examples and illustrations from around the globe. Government Budgeting and Expenditure Management is ideally suited as the primary text for advanced undergraduate or graduate courses in government budgeting or public financial management, or as a supplementary text for courses in public finance, public economics, economic development, public administration or comparative politics. With its attention to practical implementation aspects, the book will also be of direct interest to practitioners, policy-makers, and government employee training organizations.
