N.B.: All of the regular PFM Blog authors and editors are IMF staff. Their posts are their own, and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the IMF, its Board of Directors or the governments they represent. For more information, please see our content policy above.
PFM Blog co-Founders
Michel Lazare is Division Chief of FAD's PFM 2 Division. He founded the PFM Blog with Bill Dorotinsky. After graduating from E.S.S.E.C., I.E.P. Paris, and the French Ecole Nationale d'Administration (E.N.A), Michel started his professional life in the French Ministry of Finance. He joined the International Monetary Fund in 1990. Following assignments in the Fund's African (AFR) and Middle East (now MCD) Departments, Michel moved to FAD in January 2004. Apart from co-editing the PFM blog, his usual tasks involve toiling on the latest technical assistance draft report or office memorandum. He has publicly confessed to being a "Crackberry-addict" and his family is still frantically looking for a cure.
Bill Dorotinsky is a lead public sector specialist in the World Bank’s Europe and Central Asia region. Bill was the co-founder of the PFM Blog, and until 2008 was the Deputy Division Chief of the IMF FAD's PFM 2 Division. Bill is an honorary FAD staff, whose career spans the World Bank, U.S. Treasury, some overseas PFM assignments, and the U.S. Office of Management and Budget. Bill styles himself as a Don Quixote of PFM, endlessly tilting at the windmill of PFM reform across the globe. When not working, Bill enjoys insomnia, photography, ancient history, and the latest electronic gadgets for working while mobile.
PFM Blog Current Editors
Michel Lazare (see above)
Holger van Eden is Deputy Division Chief in FAD's PFM 2 Division. He has worked extensively with Ministries of Finance in Eastern Europe, China and the Caribbean. His areas of focus are budget preparation, institutional restructuring, budget law, and government cash management. Holger has worked as team leader and project coordinator in international consultancy, as an economic journalist and editor, and as a financial consultant for a global accounting firm. He started his career in the Dutch Ministry of Finance. While Holger finds Washington DC a quite attractive posting, he does suffer from the lack of good cappuccino in the US and the forced (!) visits to endless shopping malls.
Regular Blog Authors
Richard Allen is Deputy Division Chief of FAD's PFM 1 Division. Before joining the IMF he worked at the UK Treasury, the OECD and the World Bank. He has advised the governments of some 40 countries in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Latin America on their budget systems, and is the author of several books and articles on public financial management. In his spare time, he enjoys bringing up his young daughter, collecting contemporary art, opera and golf.
Franck Bessette has been a Technical Assistance Advisor in FAD's PFM 2 Division since June 1, 2009. Between August 2006 and May 2009, Franck was a PFM expert in the PEFA Secretariat. After an academic career as a specialist in Arab studies and Islamology and as a teacher, Franck graduated from the French Ecole Nationale d’Administration (ENA). During his career in the French Supreme Audit Institution (Cour des comptes), he worked as an expert for the European Commission in Palestine (Ramallah, 2003-2004) and for the Board of Auditors of the United-Nations.
Guilhem Blondy is a technical assistance advisor in FAD's PFM 2 Division. He worked in the French Supreme Audit Institution (Cour des comptes), and then in the French Ministry of Budget as advisor to the Minister for Transport, Industry and Environmental Policies. More recently, he was the Deputy Chief Financial Officer of IFP, a public research center based near Paris and specialized in energy, transport and environmental issues. In his spare time, he enjoys spending time with his wife Anne, reading history books, watching rugby games and traveling.
Jean-Luc Helis is a Senior Economist in FAD's PFM Division 2. Jean-Luc participated in or led missions to Africa, Middle East and Central Asia. Prior to joining the Fund, he worked for five years as a European Union pre-accession advisor in the Hungarian Ministry of Finance, following seven years as a public accountant in the Public Accounting General Directorate of the French Ministry of Finance and six years as a public financial management expert in the French association for the Development of Economic and Financial Technologies (ADETEF). He is a fan of the Olympique de Marseille soccer team, which may be quite challenging or occasionally even depressing!
Richard Hughes in a Technical Assistance Advisor in FAD's PFM 1 Division. He worked in the UK Treasury for seven years on a range of international and domestic macroeconomic and fiscal issues, most recently as the head of the 2007 Comprehensive Spending Review. He joined the IMF following a brief spell in Paris where he was advising the French Ministry of Finance on the preparation of their first multi-year budget. In his spare time, he enjoys museums, theatres and the Sunday papers.
Davina Jacobs is a Senior Economist in FAD's PFM 1 Division. Since joining the IMF in 1999, Davina has been globe-trotting on PFM and fiscal issues across Eastern Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia. Davina's research interests span fiscal indicators of sustainability, corruption, budget classification, and public investment budgeting. Prior to the IMF, Davina served in the South African Budget Office, working on MTEF development, and the South African Central Advisory Services (CEAS), working in macroeconomic policy and modeling. In her spare time she enjoys the theater, music, movies, photography, and is "secretly addicted" to watching home improvement shows on TV.
Abdul Khan is Senior Economist in FAD's PFM1 Division. Before joining the IMF Abdul worked in the Department of Finance and Administration of Australia and KPMG in London. While in Australia he was a key manager of the team that implemented the accrual, outcome, and output budgeting framework. Abdul also led the preparation of the first "whole-of-government" financial statements of the Australian Federal Government. Since joining the Fund Abdul has provided technical assistance to the governments of many countries in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. In his spare time he enjoys music, poetry, and cricket - not necessarily in that order.
Pokar Khemani is Senior Economist in FAD's PFM1 Division. For the last fifteen years he has been working with the International Monetary Fund, both at the Headquarters, as well as a resident advisor to a number of countries. Over these years, he has been primarily engaged in providing advice and technical assistance in public financial management to a range of member countries in Europe, Asia-Pacific, Central Asia and Africa. Before joining the IMF, he held senior executive positions in financial management with the Indian government. In his spare time, he enjoys music, movies and nature.
Duncan Last is a Senior Economist with FAD's PFM 1 division. He joined headquarters two years ago after 20 years in public finance, including: regional IMF advisor in AFRITAC East and Slovenia, budget advisor in Mali and Papua New Guinea, debt management advisor in Papua New Guinea, and debt management software designer at the Commonwealth Secretariat in UK. He also had three other careers before public finance: teacher of physics, manufacturing engineer, and software designer. In Slovenia, he was one of the prime movers behind the Center of Excellence in Finance. Slovenia was also where Duncan developed the most important passion of his life (after his family) - sailing. Duncan grew up in Ethiopia, where he attended the French Lycée. His interests are travel, history, environment, politics, chess and bridge.
Luc Leruth, a former member of FAD's PFM 2 Division, is currently a Senior Economist at the Paris office of the IMF Offices in Europe. Prior to that, he was head of FAD's Fiscal Transparency Unit and ran the Pacific Financial Technical Assistance Center between 2002 and 2004. He has published a number of articles in scientific journals. He has also developed a passion for writing (he is notably the author of two acclaimed novels) and for single lens reflex cameras of the 70’s (of which he has many and some work) although he has recently discovered (to his amazement) that cameras no longer needed films these days.
Ian Lienert is a Senior Economist in FAD's PFM 2 Division. After beginning his career in the New Zealand Treasury and the OECD Economics Department, he worked in the IMF's African Department and the IMF Institute as a macro economist. Since 1998 he has advised government officials in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean of good public financial management practices. Outside work, he occasionally teaches Christian education classes and, to stay alert, completes long-distance running and cross-country ski races (when not attending to his family's needs and playing the piano).
Gösta Ljungman is an Economist in the FAD's PFM 1 Division. He has a background as a government official in the Swedish Ministry of Finance, with a focus on fiscal frameworks and budget preparation issues. In addition to his work in the Swedish government administration, he has worked with a number of governments in Central and Eastern Europe on modernizing expenditure management, including a five year residency in Moscow. Gösta enjoys spending his spare time in the outdoors, rising to any challenge nature has to offer.
Francois Michel is an Economist in FAD’s PFM 2 Division. He began his career within the industrial conglomerate Alstom before joining the French Ministry of Finance and, most recently, the Office of Budget and Planning at the IMF. Francois was educated at the Ecole Polytechnique and the Ecole des Mines de Paris. In his spare time, he enjoys spending time with his wife Amy, reading, and playing guitar(s) (since recently a 1957 Gibson ES145).
Sailendra Pattanayak, an Indian national, works at the IMF’s FAD Public Financial Management Division M1 as a Senior Economist. Sailendra holds a degree in Mechanical Engineering from the National Institute of Technology (Rourkela, India) and masters degrees in Public Administration and Public Policy from the French Ecole Nationale d'Administration (E.N.A) and Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris (Sciences-Po) respectively. He has undertaken public financial management missions to a number of countries in Central Asia, Middle East and Africa. Before joining the IMF, he held senior executive positions in financial management with the Indian government. In his spare time, he enjoys Indian classical music, ghazals (love songs put to Indian Ragas) and nature.
Mario Falcao Pessoa, a Brazilian national, works at the IMF’s FAD Public Financial Management Division M2 as a Senior Economist. Mario holds degrees in Economics and in Civil Engineering from the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, and has a Master in Economics and Social Studies from the University of Wales (UK). He has participated in public financial management missions to Angola, Sao Tome and Principe, Equatorial Guinea, Nepal, and Mexico. While in Brazil, he previously worked at the Brazilian Ministry of Finance (Treasury, Economic Policy Secretariat, and Internal Control Secretariat). In his spare time he enjoys traveling with the family and running.
Andrea Schaechter is a senior economist in FAD’s Fiscal Policy and Surveillance Division. Before she joined the department, she spent two years in the Public Finance Unit at the European Commission’s Directorate General for Economic and Financial Affairs. Prior to her assignment in Brussels, she was desk economist for Ukraine at the IMF, worked several years on monetary and financial sector issues in the IMF’s Monetary and Capital Markets Department and one year as desk economist for Benin. Andrea holds a Ph.D. from Wuerzburg University, Germany. In her spare time, she enjoys playing and watching tennis in DC's sweltering heat and Europe's steady light rain.
Justin Tyson is an Economist in FAD's Expenditure Policy Division and was previously an Econmist in FAD PFM 2 Division. Prior to joining the IMF Justin worked at the UK Treasury, focusing on the government's spending reviews, and before that at the Inter-American Development Bank. Justin spends much of his time working on Afghanistan, but enjoys providing technical assistance in other countries when the opportunity arises.
Guest Blog Authors
Frits Bos is senior economist on public finance at CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis. He worked for about fifteen years in national accounting. This included research on links with economic theory, writing European guidelines, monitoring the quality of GNP-estimates in Europe, responsible for Dutch public finance statistics and member of the editorial board of the Review of Income and Wealth. Since 2001, he works at the CPB analysing and forecasting Dutch public finance, analysing policy proposals and advising about fiscal principles, e.g. invented the typically Dutch "robust budget balance". He is fond of his wife, four children, Eritrean food and reading biographies and history. He is probably CPB's most backward looking economist!
Jim Brumby is the lead public specialist on public financial management issues in the World Bank's Poverty Reduction and Economic Management (PREM) network.
Dick Emery is a consultant to FAD who in February participated in the review of the Mongolian budget system. Dick also has served as in interim consultant to the OECD; the US representative to the peer review of Greece and the unnamed OECD consultant to the Greek Government Budget Reform Unit. In 2005, Dick retired after almost forty years in budgeting in the US, the last eight as Assistant Director for Budget Review at OMB. He represented the US in the OECD’s Working Party for Senior Budget Officials for a number of years, the last three serving as chair of that group. When not consulting, Dick lives in southern New Mexico on the edge of the Chihuahuan desert where he is attempting to master cooking with chilies.
Lewis Hawke is an international advisor on public sector management. In his career of more than 25 years he has worked as a senior civil servant in Australia and UK, with a particular focus on performance improvement initiatives. He has also worked as an international specialist consultant on major reform projects funded by the IMF, World Bank, UNDP, OECD, ADB, AusAID, DfID and the Ford Foundation in Asia and Europe. He was a member of the Global Reporting Initiative’s international working group on public sector agency aspects of sustainability reporting. He is a national fellow of the Institute of Public Administration, Australia. In addition to his obsession with organisational performance and accountability, Lewis is passionate about his family, football, music and theatre.
Philip Joyce is Professor of Public Policy and Public Administration at The George Washington University. His research primarily focuses on the U.S. federal budget and the use of performance information in the budget process. He is the author of two books—Public Budgeting Systems (8th edition—with Robert D. Lee and Ronald Johnson) and Public Performance: Why Management Matters (with Patricia Ingraham and Amy Donahue), in addition to more than 40 articles and book chapters. Phil has 12 years of public sector work experience, including five years each with the U.S. Congressional Budget Office and the Illinois Bureau of the Budget. He has consulted internationally, both as an individual and with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, in the People’s Republic of China, Latvia, Slovenia and Mexico. Professor Joyce is a Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration. He is a past President of the American Association of Budget and Program Analysis, and a past Chair of the Center on Accountability and Performance of the American Society for Public Administration.
Ismail Manik is a consultant at the World Bank Institute, on leave from Ministry of Finance, Maldives. He is a graduate of Columbia University (MPA, PEPM) and University of Adelaide (B Econ). He joined the Ministry of Finance in 1995 and has worked with World Bank counterparts on public expenditure management including a PER and a CFAA.
Carlos Santiso is the Manager of the Governance Division of the African Development Bank, based in Tunis. French with Spanish roots, he previously erred in the wetter lands of Scotland, the altitudes of the Peruvian Andes as a governance and public finance adviser to the United Kingdom Department for International Development. He previously explored the many islands of Stockholm as a promoter of democracy and clean elections at the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, as well as the more sinuous corridors of politics of the French Prime Minister’s Office in the Hôtel Matignon in Paris. Carlos has worked in over a dozen countries in Africa and Latin America for as many organizations. A graduate from Sciences Pô Paris (IEP MA), Columbia University (SIPA MIA) and Johns Hopkins University (SAIS PhD), he has written extensively on democracy, governance and aid. However, his passion and inspiration are his wife, his poetry, and traveling to enjoy both.
Salvatore Schiavo-Campo, currently an international consultant for various international organizations, is a retired senior staff member of the Fund, the Asian Development Bank, and the World Bank--with operational experience in leading capacities in some 50 countries on four continents. Previously, he taught in several universities, concluding as full Professor and Chairman of Economics at the University of Massachusetts. A Columbia University Ph.D., his main areas of experience and expertise are public financial management, governance and public administration, trade and development, and M&E. He has published some 30 scholarly articles and 13 books and monographs--including the 1970 classic "Perspectives in Economic Development" (with Hans W. Singer), the widely-known "Managing Government Expenditure" in 1999 (with Daniel Tommasi) and, most recently, "Public Management in Global Perspective" (with Hazel M.McFerson).
Roger Scott-Douglas is Executive Director at the Treasury Board Secretariat. For the last three years he has been on assignment in Paris, as Chargé de mission, auprès du Directeur général, Direction générale de la modernisation de l’Etat. Nobody at TBS feels sorry for him. He has worked as a senior executive on a number of major management reform initiatives, as well as innovation in service improvement. He has served as a senior consultant for the OECD and as a technical advisor for the IMF. After over 20 years in the public sector, he fears that, at some point, the need to get a real job will catch up to him.
Gérard Séguin has spent over 35 years in the public administration field, most of them with the Canadian federal Government as a senior manager in large departments such as Health Canada, Natural Resources Canada and Environment Canada. He also served in strategic organization such as the Privy Council Office and the Prime Minister Office. His main field of expertise is public resource management. He also actively participated in large Canadian public service reforms such as in the 90’s the implementation of Program Budgeting and more recently the Management Accountability Framework (MAF). For the last 6 years, as a senior consultant, he has shared his program budgeting knowledge with countries such as Algeria, Mali, Ethiopia, Burkina Faso and Djibouti. At this time, his biggest challenge is to learn how to retire.
Benoît Taiclet decided after a brilliant military career in the French navy to become a senior civil servant. Graduate of the ENA, he worked at the administrative and financial directorate of the ministry of Defense before moving to the Ministry of Finance's Budget Directorate, where he was a Division chief. He is currently working on the tail end of the implementation of the 2001 organic budget law and other public finance reforms, giving him the oppportunity to develop a strong technical expertise, in particular on performance and program budgeting.
Sanjay Vani is a lead financial management specialist in the World Bank's Operations Services Financial Management Anchor. Sanjay has over 27 years of experience in several regions (Europe and Central Asia, South Asia, and East Asia). He has contributed to PFM reforms in several countries. Sanjay, together with a colleague from the PREM anchor, lead the work on PFM agenda of the Bank.
Vera Wilhelm is a senior economist with the Poverty Reduction Group at the World Bank, where she has been leading work on the implementation of Poverty Reduction Strategies. Vera is a German national and graduated from the University of Cologne after spending some time at NYU and HEC in Paris. After joining the Bank, she's worked on a few countries in Africa and the Baltic States, both at headquarters and in the field. She has an interest in capacity building issues which she pursued as part of her assignments with PREM and the World Bank Institute . She spends most of her spare time with her two girls and enjoys cooking, yoga, movies and discovering new places.
Andy Wynne (andywynne@btinternet.com) is working with Lagos State Government, Nigeria, on budgeting. He will soon also be working with five Nigerian states to improve the quality of their audit services on the six year DfID funded SPARC project. He is a member of the AFROSAI-E Technical Committee and an advisor for the Federation of Accountants and Auditors General of West Africa. He is also editor of the International Journal of Governmental Financial Management.
Blogger Emeritus
Dominique Bouley was a senior economist in FAD's PFM Division 2 until May 2009. Dominique graduated from the French Ecole Nationale du Trésor. After a career in the Accounting Directorate of the French Ministry of Finance, he worked for FAD between the 1983 and 2009, alternating positions at headquarters and in the field, as a resident long-term expert in Mali, Benin, Lebanon, and Lao, P.D.R.. Dominique is a recognized guru on PFM systems in Francophone Africa. When he is not fixing a budget functional classification in Africa, Dominique is usually armed with a screwdriver and a hammer completing some repairs or home improvement project. During his stopovers in France, you can also find him on the banks of the Dordogne river constructing his sail boat.
Teresa Dabán, a Spanish national, is a Senior Economist in WHD. She transferred to WHD in May 2009 after working as a Senior Economist in FAD’s PFM Division M2. In her eight years with the IMF, Teresa has worked in many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, Europe, Latin America, and Asia, in a variety of assignments including on macrofiscal analysis, fiscal transparency and public finance management. Prior to joining the Fund in 2000, she served for eight years as an advisor in the Spanish Ministry of Finance. Teresa holds a Master degree on monetary and financial economy from the Center for Monetary and Financial Studies (CEMFI, Madrid, Spain) and an MSc on Econometrics and Mathematical Economics from the L.S.E.. Her current research work includes oil revenue management in low-income countries. In her spare time she likes reading history books, blogging, and playing with her little dog Leila.
Lubin Doe was a senior economist in FAD's PFM Division 2. He is a citizen of Togo; as Lubin puts it: it is a small country in West Africa, so small that you may need a magnifying glass to locate it on some maps...Lubin was schooled in Abidjan (Côte d'Ivoire, post secondary education), Rennes (France, BA, MS), and Tucson (Arizona, MS and PhD). In previous lives, he was Alternate Advisor to an Executive Director at the IMF Board of Directors, IMF resident representative in Cameroon, Deputy Director of Research at the Central Bank of West African States (BCEAO) in Dakar (Senegal). He has published or co-published several articles on macroeconomic and tax policy issues. He spends his spare time raising up his children and reading, notably Christian books. His secret wishes (not so secret anymore...) are to educate children and farm after his retirement from paper work.
Taryn Parry was a senior economist in the IMF's Office of Internal Audit and Inspection before leaving the Fund in May 2009. She received her MA in economics (University of Colorado) and a Ph.D. in public administration (Syracuse University). Before joining the Fund in 1997, she was an assistant professor at the University of Georgia, and also worked at the World Bank and USAID. In her 12 years at the Fund she worked in the areas of macrofiscal analysis, fiscal transparency and public financial management. In her free time she enjoys playing with her three children, visiting with family and friends, riding her horse and bonding with nature.
Christian Schiller worked at the IMF between 1983 and 2009. He was Resident Representative (Madagascar, Croatia) and in the IMF Offices in Europe. He headed many missions, recently PFM missions to Africa and Europe. Prior to joining the IMF, he taught at the University of Mainz, from where he also received his PhD. He has published widely, including on expenditure arrears and medium-term public finance frameworks. Christian is interested in art and enjoys Saturday mornings on the internet following German football.
Marc Robinson was a senior economist in FAD's PFM 1 Division from 2004 to 2009. Prior to joining the IMF in 2004, Marc was an economics professor in Australia for 10 years, publishing on PFM issues extensively. Prior to academia, Marc was a civil servant in the Australian State of Victoria and national government.
Eivind Tandberg was Deputy Division Chief in FAD's PFM 2 Division, and co-editor of this PFM blog before his early retirement in mid-2009. He held the same position in FAD from 2002 - 2005, and from 2005 – 2008 was the IMF’s regional public financial management advisor for South East Europe, located at the Center of Excellence in Finance in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Prior to joining the IMF, Eivind was Chief for the Carbon Offset unit in the World Bank and a Deputy Director General in the Norwegian Ministry of Finance. He enjoys social gatherings, music from February 1982, reading, skiing and long walks in unknown cities.
Jon Shields is a Senior Economist with AFR. He previously served as Head of the Fiscal Transparency Unit in FAD. Before that, Jon headed missions in the IMF African Department to Malawi, Liberia, The Gambia and Angola. In past lives, he was an Alternate Executive Director of the IMF, Senior Economic Adviser in both the Bank of England and HM Treasury, Chief Economist (Europe) for Mitsubishi Bank, and Director of the Employment Institute. Before family, he enjoyed drama, walking, music and photography.
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