France’s budgetary position is disastrous, and the country appears to be moving inexorably towards a fiscal crisis like that which brought Greece to its knees over a decade ago. The land of Molière presents one…
Contemporary public financial management (PFM) is, according to an emerging school of thought, in a parlous condition and needs a complete rebuild. I disagree. An influential recent formulation of the views of this school of…
To what extent can digitalization give us what we need to properly measure government performance? What follows is the last in a series addressing this question, as well as a closely associated question: should we…
What opportunities does digitalization offer for better measures of output quality in the public sector? This question is the focus of what follows – the second in a series examining the extent to which digitalization…
Digitalization improves public sector performance. But to what extent does it also enhance performance measurement? To what extent can digitalization give us what we need to properly measure government performance? These are questions that I…
Yet another call for governments to abandon debt limits and focus instead on net worth! This time it’s in the United Kingdom, where an influential think tank, the Resolution Foundation, has proposed the replacement of…
Expenditure ceilings are a key instrument for achieving the objectives of medium-term budgeting. This is why the question of how to set appropriate and workable expenditure ceilings has been a major focus of public financial…
Knowing the budget baseline is an essential part of good budgeting, which makes the methodology for estimating the baseline important. What follows focuses on the need, in many countries, to include within the baseline estimation…
Zombie ideas – the term Paul Krugman coined for ideas that make no sense but refuse to die – are not confined to economics. There are also a few to be found in the field…
There is wide agreement that attacking budgetary incrementalism is an important objective of budget reform. But when we go into battle against incrementalism, we need to be clear on what exactly we are fighting against.…