EU Budget Support and its Relationship with PFM

Posted by European Commission, DG EuropeAid

The EU is committed to provide Budget Support (BS) to strengthen country ownership, finance national strategies for implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals and promote sound and transparent public finances. BS is a means to use and strengthen country systems and enhance aid effectiveness. Improving public finance management (PFM) is key in BS programmes. The EU has launched in 2015 the “Collect more – Spend better” approach that combines support to fair and equitable mobilisation of domestic revenue with improved public finance management to ensure efficient and accountable execution of public expenditure.

Budget Support and PFM in the Pacific Region

Posted by Richard Neves and Virginia Horscroft[1]

From 2010 to 2019 direct budget support (DBS) from development partners to Pacific Islands Countries (PICs) has steadily increased not only in value terms but also the numbers involved.   DBS is provided by a variety of bilateral and multilateral partners to all PFTAC’s member countries in one shape or another.

Introducing a Treasury Single Account in Nigeria

Posted by Kabiru Dandago[1]

A recently published book[2] reviews the introduction of the Treasury Single Account (TSA) by the federal Government of Nigeria, a reform of major economic significance. An earlier PFM blog published in 2014 also described the development of the project.

Why Fiscal Transparency Evaluation Updates are so Useful

Posted by Vincent Tang[1]

Fiscal Transparency Evaluations (FTEs) have now been conducted by the IMF in 28 countries worldwide. They are widely regarded as the premier tool for assessing the transparency of a country’s fiscal systems and fiscal data. Almost half of the existing evaluations will soon reach their fifth birthday. As budget systems and processes evolve and change, and the amount and quality of fiscal data improves, the time has come to reevaluate the transparency of these systems. However, the first full ‘repeat’ FTE was completed in Kenya in 2019, updating the original FTE conducted in 2014.[2] The report received substantial attention from the media.

Benefits Management in Major Public Investment Projects

Posted by Eivind Tandberg[1]

The Norwegian research program Concept supports research related to the country’s public investment management framework. Concept recently published a working paper on how expected benefits are managed in large public investments. The paper reviewed the international literature on benefits management and looked at how the idea has been applied in practice in five major Norwegian investment projects.

Delivering on India’s Public Finance Reform Promises

Posted by Abhirup Bhunia[1]

India’s annual federal government budget for 2019-20 was worth $391 billion. A lower-middle income country with 21 percent of its population still below the poverty line, India runs some of the world’s largest social safety net programs. These include MNREGA – the world’s largest public works program - and the Public Food Distribution System, which account for more than 1 percent of GDP.

Policy-Based Budgeting: How to Spot the “Fakes”

Posted by Andrew Laing[1]

Governments introduce budget reforms programs for all kinds of reasons, noble or otherwise. But how can we tell if their declared good intentions are real? How can we identify genuine reform from “fake” reform? A recent paper by the Washington-based Institute for State Effectiveness provides a dozen examples of red flags for identifying “fake” budget reforms. It focused on two closely related areas of budgeting that are commonly found in PFM reform programs:

Improving Oversight of State Enterprises in Southern Africa

Posted by Robert Clifton, Avril Halstead and Tjeerd Tim[1]

The IMF’s Regional Technical Assistance Center for Southern Africa, AFRITAC South (AFS), recently organized a customized workshop on strengthening the oversight and monitoring of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) for four countries in the region.[2] The workshop brought together technical staff of SOE oversight units from Botswana, Namibia, Seychelles, and South Africa for both knowledge development and peer‐to‐peer exchange of ideas and experiences.

Over the last two years, AFS has assisted Botswana and Seychelles in strengthening their SOE oversight capacity. It has also assisted Namibia and South Africa in their efforts to improve fiscal risk management.

How Internal Auditors Can Leverage the Power of FMIS

Posted by Puneet Kapoor[1]

Internal auditors in government are required to understand the internal control system, evaluate its design and effectiveness, and advise management on strengthening the system. In most jurisdictions, government internal auditors continue to use traditional manual auditing methods of testing controls by performing the tests on a retrospective and cyclical basis.

Top 10 PFM Blog Posts of 2019

Posted by Thibault Vermeulen, Richard Allen, and Teresa Curristine [1]

In the spirit of celebrating another successful year, the time has come to announce the Top Ten most popular blog posts of 2019.

2019 was a ground-breaking year for the PFM blog, with a record 76 articles being published. Readership levels remained high, as did the rich diversity of our articles, authors and readers. 44 percent of the articles, and a majority of those in the top 10, were written by external contributors from international organizations, the public sector, academia, and the private sector, which is higher than last year. Topics ranged widely, from corruption, to FMIS, to green budgeting, to gender budgeting, to fiscal rules and PFM in resource-rich countries, to making public infrastructure more efficient, and more. Some of these topics are old perennials, others were breaking new ground and stretching the envelope of knowledge.