Is Uganda Caught up in a Public Debt Safety Trap?

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Posted by Linda Nakato and Enock Bulime^[1]

Uganda can expect to experience further increases in its fiscal deficit and public debt that will undermine its economic potential. This is largely due to fiscal complacency, profligacy, and incomprehensive debt sustainability diagnostics that mainly rely on ambiguous concepts such as the net present value of debt. Pressures from politicians, overly optimistic forecasts and pandemic-induced uncertainties also play a prominent role in explaining these dismal fiscal outcomes. This makes it hard to reconcile the alleged safety of Uganda’s public debt with a sharp rise in the debt stock.

A Proposal for Making Aid More Efficient and Effective

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Posted by Andrew Laing^[1]

Governments and their international partners are always looking for ways to make aid more efficient and effective. There are many dimensions to efficiency and effectiveness but an important one is to understand how important aid is to supporting government sector policies. The problem is that despite there being ample data, governments and donors do not routinely track and analyse how much aid is allocated to different sectors, and how this relates to government spending in those sectors. This happens partly because policy makers and donors use different systems for classifying their spending, which may also be denominated in several currencies, a further complication.

The central problem is that there are two different classification systems. Donors report aid to the OECD according to Development Assistance Committee – Creditor Reporting System (DAC-CRS) classification standards, while governments report their fiscal activity to the IMF according to Government Finance Statistics (GFS) standards. Hence, to be able to analyse aid and government expenditures by sector both datasets need to be comparable so that policy decisions are better informed.

Public Participation in the Budget Process: A New Approach

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Posted by Marianne Fabian, Suad Hasan and Juan Pablo Guerrero^[1]

 

Establishing effective public participation in the budget process is challenging. To assist in overcoming these constraints, governments can tap civil society as key partners in setting up mechanisms that incorporate both the government’s and citizens' perspectives on how to design and implement public participation. It has been shown that participation can help governments to better respond to the public’s needs and can facilitate more effective and efficient execution of public resources^[2].

Managing Governance Vulnerabilities and Fiscal Risks

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Posted by Richard Allen, Racheeda Boukezia, and Lesley Fisher^[1]

Weaknesses in public governance heighten risks that corrupt acts may take place. Analysis of these vulnerabilities is a starting point for understanding the potential causes of corruption and the measures that should be taken to manage or mitigate them. Governance vulnerabilities are often associated with another important concept, namely fiscal risk, but the two concepts are not identical.

Introducing Gender Budgeting in Togo

Togoreforme.com

 

Posted by Lewis Murara, Virginia Alonso Albarran, Amina Bambara, Laura Gores, and Clemens Mungenast^[1]

 

Togo has undertaken ambitious budget reforms in recent years. The flagship reform was the transition from line-item to program budgeting in 2020, that was used as an opportunity to introduce gender budgeting. Developing gender budgeting requires substantial effort, a medium-term learning perspective and persistence. Anchoring the political objective of gender equality within the budget, the core policy instrument of government, promises better budgetary decisions. This year, the Togolese authorities are preparing their second Gender Budget Statement.

 

Advancing Fiscal Transparency for Development : The GIFT Online Course is Now Live!

 

Photo provided by GIFT

 

Posted by Marianne Fabian, Raquel Ferreira and Juan Pablo Guerrero^[1]

We are thrilled to announce that the Global Initiative for Fiscal Transparency’s (GIFT) Advancing Fiscal Transparency for Development free online course is now live and publicly available!

Learn all about the ins and outs of advancing sustainable fiscal transparency and how it can help achieve good development outcomes, a first in the field! Developed with support from the United States’ Department of State, this self-paced course is available in English and French and provides a great free open access resource for anyone who would like to learn more about building open and accountable public financial management (PFM) systems.

Public Financial Management and Google Maps

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Posted by Ian Ball, John Crompton and Dag Detter^[1]

 

Good leadership requires good information to support smart, timely decisions. More fundamentally, modern democracy itself relies on information that can be understood and trusted by its citizens and interpreted by all stakeholders. Nowhere is this more important than in the management of our public resources.

How Green Policies can Lead to Long-term Economic Growth

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Posted by Talal Rafi^[1]

The world is running a race against time on the climate front. An IPCC report states that the world needs to attain net zero emissions targets by 2050 to keep temperatures 1.5℃ below pre-industrial levels. A Mckinsey study shows that $9.2 trillion of investments are needed annually over the next three decades if the world is to achieve net zero. With 85% of investors considering the sustainability factor when investing, the ball is in the court of the governments to create green policies that can drive long-term economic growth. On which specific policies should governments focus?

Strengthening Fiscal Transparency of State-owned Enterprises in Francophone Sub-Saharan Africa

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Posted by Bruno Imbert, Abdoulahi Mfombouot, Laura Gores ¹  

State-owned enterprises (SOEs) are important actors in francophone Sub-Saharan Africa. They provide essential services to populations, help manage natural resources, lead public investment projects, and provide employment in various sectors such as water, electricity, transport, telecommunications, and extractive industries. But they also generate fiscal risks that are commensurate with their importance for both the economy and citizens. According to IMF studies, bailouts of SOEs have averaged a cost of 3 percent of GDP, and in many countries SOEs are loss-making, generating a constant drain on public finances.

Building a Multidimensional Standardized Chart of Accounts in Poland

Photo provided by: Ministry of Finance - Republic of Poland

 

Post by Katarzyna Szarkowska, Bartosz Staszewski and Vijay Ramachandran^[1]

 

The Standardised Chart of Accounts (SCoA) reform context

Development and implementation of the Standardised Chart of Accounts (SCoA) in Poland is a key component of a broader set of PFM reforms, which were originally defined in the Assumptions of the Budgetary System Reform (ABSR). This high-level conceptual document, adopted by the Council of Ministers of Poland in July 2016, outlined key objectives and directions for reforming the  budgetary system. The ABSR provided a broad vision of the new budgetary system and empowered the Ministry of Finance to initiate further conceptual and legislative works, necessary to prepare and implement the reform.