Marc Robinson Blog

Ending the Confusion on Medium-Term Expenditure Ceilings

- April 13, 2023 - Marc Robinson comment

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…

Budgeting / Government Expenditure / PFM

Budget Baselines & Public Employment

- September 25, 2022 - Marc Robinson comment

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…

Budgeting / PFM

Zombie Ideas in Public Financial Management

- August 8, 2022 - Marc Robinson 2 Comments

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…

Budgeting / PFM / Spending Review

Attacking Budgetary Incrementalism

- April 13, 2022 - Marc Robinson comment

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.…

Budgeting / Monitoring & Evaluation / Performance Budgeting / PFM

Unit Cost Budgeting: Use Selectively (4/4)

- February 1, 2022 - Marc Robinson comment

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.…

Budgeting / Government Expenditure / Monitoring & Evaluation / Performance Budgeting / PFM

Unit Cost Budgeting: The Uncertainty Problem (3/4)

- January 25, 2022 - Marc Robinson comment

In this blog piece – the third in a series of four – I look at why budgeting based on unit costs doesn’t work well for services where there is a lot of uncertainty about…

Monitoring & Evaluation / Performance Budgeting / PFM

When Unit Costs Don’t Work (2/4)

- January 19, 2022 - Marc Robinson comment

In this blog piece — the second of a four-part series on unit cost budgeting — I look at why unit cost budgeting cannot be applied to outputs which are highly “heterogeneous,” of which there…

Monitoring & Evaluation / Performance Budgeting / PFM

Unit Cost Budgeting? (1/4)

- January 14, 2022 - Marc Robinson 1 Comment

Funding public services based on output unit costs is a great idea. However, it only works for selected government services. The idea that the entire government budget should be based on output unit costs is…

Performance Budgeting / PFM

The Illusion of Outcome-Based Budgeting

- November 28, 2021 - Marc Robinson 2 Comments

The notion that performance budgeting means budgeting based on outcomes is surprisingly widespread. It is, however, a misconception – a misconception which has led to confusion and missteps in PFM reform in some countries, particularly…

Fiscal policy / Government Expenditure / PFM / Spending Review

Making Spending Review Fit for Purpose

- September 1, 2021 - Marc Robinson comment

Spending review, as I wrote recently, will be needed more than ever in the post-pandemic era. Surely, then, it is encouraging that there has over the past decade been a major expansion in the number…