Thursday, February 25, 2010

Marshall Islands - Civil Service Reforms



Civil service rationalization. The public sector wage bill has doubled since 2000 primarily due to a rise in the public payroll and, at 22 percent of GDP, is significantly higher than in other countries in the region. The mission welcomed the plan to conduct a comprehensive civil service personnel audit to identify areas of over-staffing and disproportionate pay. Building on the audit’s findings, a combination of civil service pay cuts and reductions in employment should be phased over the near term.


Related:
Doing Business

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Effective Habits of Budget Advisors

The role of the budget advisor is a complex and challenging one. Developing countries have become much more discerning and demanding in their requirements for technical assistance. More and more they rely on their neighbours and peers to fulfil this role. At the same time, competition among providers of assistance has increased. Against this background, an effective advisor needs to have not only outstanding technical skills and broad international experience but also patience, persistence, resilience, balanced judgment, and diplomatic skills.

- Reforming Fiscal Institutions: The Elusive Art of the Budget Advisor

Planning Commissions should disappear as countries develop?

South Africa I guess is an exception- their recent green paper on the newly established Planning Commission;

What will the role of National Planning Commission be?

* Lead the development (and periodic review) of a draft Vision 2025 (“South Africa Vision 2025”) and long –term national strategic plan for approval by Cabinet (first plan 2010)
* Lead investigations into critical long term trends under the supervision of the Minister in the Presidency for the National Planning Commission, with technical support from a Secretariat and in partnership with relevant other parties
* Advise on key issues such as food security, water security, energy choices, economic development, poverty and inequality, structure of the economy, human resource development, social cohesion, health, defense capabilities and scientific progress
* Assist with mobilizing society around a national vision and other tasks related to strategic planning
* Contribute to reviews of implementation or progress in achieving the objectives of the National Plan
* Contribute to the development of international partnerships and networks of expertise on planning


Related:
Development of central fiscal institutions;
Planning ministries are quite common in developing countries, but become less common as countries develop. Across the world, there has been a shift from traditional detailed planning, as reflected in 5-year plans and similar instruments, towards strategic coordination. This coordination is increasingly done by finance ministries or by prime ministers’ offices. This is often accompanied by a gradual integration of planning, strategy development and budgeting into a single, coordinated process, and a unified, strategic budget document. Planning ministries were often involved in project preparation, but this function is shifted to line ministries as their capacity develop


Fiscal Risks: Sources, Disclosure and Management
Ministries of Finance in Small, Developing Economies – Their Role and Structure

South Africa: Restructuring of the Ministry of Finance: A Case Study

Back to Basics- Personal Income Tax

Figure 1 Basic Income: Flat Tax

Figure 2 The Government's Budget Constraint

Figure 3 Optimal Tax Rate

Figure 4 Maximum Tax Rate

Figure 5 Marginal Tax Rate on Top Income

For the Student- Personal Income Taxation: From Theory to Policy;
The main change in the approach to taxation came from the later integration of public finance into the general area of welfare economics, which was itself a major concomitant of the successful introduction of a utility-maximising approach to exchange in the 1870s. However, the most systematic early developments came from Cohen-Stuart in 1889 (Cohen-Stuart 1958) and Edgeworth (1897) in investigating the broad implications for progressivity of the minimisation of total disutility from taxation—ignoring any possible benefits. With the criterion of minimising total sacrifice, progression arises from decreasing marginal utility, but with equal absolute sacrifice, it depends on the precise behaviour of the marginal utility of income. Even here, there was no explicit independent role for redistribution: the maximand was strictly considered to be total utility.

This movement reached its ultimate conclusion in the 'optimal tax' literature, beginning virtually a century after the initial introduction of a utility analysis into economics. The mathematical analyses of Edgeworth were extended by allowing, in particular, for labour supply incentive effects of taxes and transfers, and including a range of specifications of the objectives of taxation, thus introducing an explicit redistributive role.8 In this final development, most of the important criteria suggested by Smith and others were ignored. The relevant branch of welfare economics into which optimal tax theory falls is the theory of the 'second best', in view of the fact that the government is unable to tax individuals' endowments of ability and instead taxes their incomes. Sometimes, stress is placed on asymmetric information aspects, in that the government cannot observe ability levels

Monday, February 15, 2010

Creating More Fiscal Space in Good Times

One of the lessons from recent crisis, according to the Fund;

A key lesson from the crisis is the desirability of fiscal space to run larger fiscal deficits when needed. There is an analogy here between the need for more fiscal space and the need for more nominal interest rate room, argued earlier. Had governments had more room to cut interest rates and to adopt a more expansionary fiscal stance, they would have been better able to fight the crisis. Going forward, the required degree of fiscal adjustment (after the recovery is securely under way) will be formidable, in light of the need to reduce debt against the background of aging-related challenges in pensions and health care. Still, the lesson from the crisis is clearly that target debt levels should be lower than those observed before the crisis. The policy implications for the next decade or two are that, when cyclical conditions permit, major fiscal adjustment is necessary and, should economic growth recover rapidly, it should be used to reduce debt-to-GDP ratios substantially, rather than to finance expenditure increases or tax cuts.

The recipe to create additional fiscal space in the years ahead and to ensure that economic booms translate into improved fiscal positions rather than procyclical fiscal stimulus is not new, but it acquires greater relevance as a result of the crisis. Medium-term fiscal frameworks, credible commitments to reducing debt-to-GDP ratios, and fiscal rules (with escape clauses for recessions) can all help in this regard. Similarly, expenditure frameworks based on long-term revenue assessments help limit spending increases during booms. And eliminating explicit revenue earmarking for prespecified budget purposes would avoid automatic expenditure cuts when revenues fall. A further challenge, as governments come under greater pressure to display improved deficit and debt data and are tempted to provide support to ailing sectors through guarantees or off-budget operations, is to ensure that all public sector operations are transparently reflected in fiscal data and that well-designed budget processes reduce policymakers’ incentives to postpone needed adjustment.


Related;
The Case For Higher Inflation
I would add, however, that there’s another case for a higher inflation rate — an argument made most forcefully by Akerlof, Dickens, and Perry (pdf). It goes like this: even in the long run, it’s really, really hard to cut nominal wages. Yet when you have very low inflation, getting relative wages right would require that a significant number of workers take wage cuts. So having a somewhat higher inflation rate would lead to lower unemployment, not just temporarily, but on a sustained basis.

Saturday, February 13, 2010