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 […]
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 can improve performance measurement in government. Let’s first recap the discussion so far. Digitalization means the use of digital tools […]
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 will try to answer in this and two subsequent blog pieces. But before doing so, let’s be clear about what […]
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 the country’s debt rules with “a target to see net worth improving.” This is a bad idea that must be […]
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 management over the past two decades. Erroneous notions as to what constitutes best practice in ceiling-setting have, however, been a […]
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 methodology a wage bill model that is capable of quantifying the budgetary impact of public employment policies. The budget baseline […]
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 of public financial management. A particularly widespread zombie idea in PFM is the proposition that the setting of hard ministry […]
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. Like many other people, I use “incrementalism” to refer to the tendency of budgeting to treat baseline expenditure as given, […]
The idea that governments should base their budgets on output unit costs is very influential. Everywhere in the world one finds people who think that unit costs are the key to making performance budgeting work. Nowhere is this more true today than in the developing world.* I know of several developing countries where the budget […]