The Reimagining Public Finance (RPF) team has put forward for discussion a thoughtful set of proposals intended to improve technical work in public financial management (PFM) and public finances more generally. These proposals are designed to address the problem of PFM advice that is dominated by a best practice mentality and that sees PFM reforms […]
Reimagining Public Finance (RPF) is an initiative by a committed group within the World Bank to address a significant problem that affects public financial management (PFM) and public finance reform practice. The problem is that too much PFM technical work is driven by a best practice mentality. When operating in best practice mode, analysts don’t […]
Many governments have invested large sums of money in the development of accrual accounting. Unfortunately, for most of these governments this has to date been a poor investment. Why? Because many are making little or no use of all the information that has been produced. This is a regrettable situation, to say the least. This […]
Performance information is crucial for high-performance government. Performance budgeting is part of that: budget decision-making needs to be informed by good information about the effectiveness and efficiency of government spending. The approach to performance information must, however, be highly strategic. To succeed, it needs to be built on a recognition of two fundamental realities. Firstly, […]
Evaluation should be a key source of information for budget decision-makers. In practice, however, it has had surprisingly little impact on decisions about what to fund and by how much. This raises the question: what can be done to realize the true potential of evaluation to improve budgeting? The failure of evaluation to contribute much […]
Is efficiency analysis the poor relation in the current wave of evaluation reforms? Governments around the world have been establishing government-wide evaluation policies; creating central units and task forces to promote evaluation; and encouraging or requiring ministries to build evaluation capability and carry out more and better evaluations. In these reforms, it is always said […]
A wave of enthusiasm for evaluation has been sweeping governments around the world in recent years. In country after country, governments are acting to increase the amount of evaluation undertaken and ensure that it is used more. Government-wide evaluation policies have been developed, and specialized units and task forces established to promote, guide, and regulate […]
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 of the extreme cases of failure to implement fiscal consolidation after the large-scale fiscal stimulus during the COVID-19 pandemic. But […]
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 thought can be found in the 2020 report Advice, Money, Results (AMR). This report issues a challenge to contemporary PFM […]
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 shift our focus from the monitoring and evaluation of performance to government analytics? Although digitalization is a valuable tool for […]