Why is Mr Tufte going to Washington

I'm doing this because I like accountability and transparency, and I believe in public service. And it is the complete opposite of everything else I do. Maybe I'll learn something. The practical consequence is that I will probably go to Washington several days each month, in addition to whatever homework and phone meetings are necessary.

-Mr Tufte

So Obama hired Edward Tufte;

Though often cast as a free-floating information guru, Mr. Tufte has a highly specific mission: on March 5, he was appointed by President Obama to a panel to advise the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, which monitors the way the $787 billion in the stimulus package is being spent...

“Political practice today too often skips right by evidence,” he said by e-mail. “When I listen to True Believers (left or right) talk about the problems that governments are seeking to solve, I keep muttering to myself, ‘How boring, it’s more complicated than that.’ And those who best know that it’s more complicated than that are public servants.”

The board has two missions: to root out waste, fraud and abuse in spending and to inform the American public how the stimulus money is being spent...

In an e-mail message, Mr. Tufte recalled the meeting and said that generally his advice had been to add more information to the site so that a visitor could see things in context. “It shouldn’t look like a government Web site, and it shouldn’t look like a corporate Web site,” he said. “This is a reporting thing — about factual, credible reporting.”...

Jerry Brito, a senior research fellow at George Mason University, has been monitoring the stimulus at his site, stimuluswatch.org.

“What we want is the raw data. We don’t need a beautiful site,” Mr. Brito said.

In fact, he says that recovery.gov is too flashy and too crowded, and uses maps too much instead of simple tables. “Tufte can do a lot of good here,” he said. “There is a lot of low-hanging fruit.”

The Secret to Happiness?

David Brooks writes;

If the relationship between money and well-being is complicated, the correspondence between personal relationships and happiness is not. The daily activities most associated with happiness are sex, socializing after work and having dinner with others. The daily activity most injurious to happiness is commuting. According to one study, joining a group that meets even just once a month produces the same happiness gain as doubling your income. According to another, being married produces a psychic gain equivalent to more than $100,000 a year.

If you want to find a good place to live, just ask people if they trust their neighbors. Levels of social trust vary enormously, but countries with high social trust have happier people, better health, more efficient government, more economic growth, and less fear of crime (regardless of whether actual crime rates are increasing or decreasing).

Further Reading;
The Hidden Wealth of Nations by David Halpern

The Politics of Happiness: What Government Can Learn from the New Research on Well-Being
Derek Bok

Haiti Donor Conference

Haiti Pledge Form looks quiet interesting.

More countries could use this approach in dealing with their donors.

Related: Another pledging form from a small state.

Filling a $9 billion hole- an MTEF for New York?

One way to save New York's finances;

Years of decisions dictated by political expediency have led to a chronic budget imbalance that threatens our short-term solvency and long-term economic health.

Fortunately, Lt. Gov. Richard Ravitch has put forward a plan to provide sorely needed oversight and discipline. He proposes to create a financial review board that would certify the budget only if it’s balanced. The board would employ a smart, multiyear strategy that would weigh significant cuts in spending against limited borrowing. And it would require Albany to adopt generally accepted accounting principles, the standard bookkeeping rules used in business.

According to the report, 'The State needs a multi-year financial planning process directly linked to the annual budget process.'

Another suggestion;

Finally, our short-term cash crunch would be eased if the state refinanced the interest rates on its tobacco-settlement bonds. Given current low long-term interest rates, this is preferable to Lt. Gov. Richard Ravitch’s plan, under which the state would borrow $2 billion a year over three years for operations, leading us down a perilous road of annual borrowing.

Related: Citizen's Budget Commission

Public Reports Watch-Running Public Hospitals in Australia

National Health and Hospitals Network report

Related;
Canberra Babylon

Health debate

Public hospitals - reform overseas

Special Announcement: Focus on Fiscal Responsibility Laws

For the next 4 weeks this blog will be focusing on Fiscal Responsibility Legislations and their international experience. Comments and views welcome.

Enjoy the following post by YangHyun Jin over at IMF's PFM blog;
Pakistan: Monitoring Implementation of the Fiscal Responsibility and Debt Limitation Law

Does talking about ownership and capacity makes sense?

An informative piece on the PFM technical assistance provided to Burundi- one of the poorest countries in the world.

A PFM strategy and its corresponding action plan for the period 2009–11, was adopted by the Council of Ministers in May 2009. It has been designed to address PFM weaknesses identified in particular through FAD diagnostic work since 2005, the Public Expenditure Management and Financial Accountability Review (PEMFAR) finalized by the World Bank in February 2008, and a Public Expenditure and Financial Accountability (PEFA) assessment performed by the European Commission (EC) in December 2008....

While promising initiatives have been recently implemented, including the installation of a Steering Committee chaired by the Minister of Finance, and of nine technical groups to implement the PFM reforms, the leadership of the reforms process within the MoF and to coordinate TA provided by donors will need to remain a point of attention....

Because of the slow pace of progress, signs of discouragement (from the experts), de-motivation (from the staff), and impatience (from the donors) are appearing, especially if it is considered that the “easiest” part of the reform has been done—strategy, action plan, laws, and decree in particular—and that the next step being a full and consistent implementation of all the provisions and actions developed in these various documents.

My tentative thoughts on the piece-

-IMF and World Bank needs to run the show, rhetoric of ownership is important, but when there is acute capacity constraints, lets face it, IMF should be the demanding advocate.

-What's an effective central finance agency? Their finance minister needs to have clarity on this important issue.

-PEMFAR of the World Bank appears a decent standard document- on MTEF they recommend Tajkistan approach which may not be the best approach. If any one can provide a link to their PEFA please do so,

-Most importantly we encourage the Fund to write more similar pieces on country case studies.

Related:
Managing Public Finance in Burundi- USAID;

The Ministry of Finance currently comprises some 250 employees (not including customs). Its workforce is thin and unmotivated at higher levels (except for some of the top officials), and drifting and underskilled at lower levels. The general erosion of staff and skills in the Burundi government, not only because of the conflict but because of the much higher compensation offered in Rwanda more recently as well, is well known and has affected the Ministry of Finance as much as the rest of the government. Issues of capacity building in the Ministry of Finance are thus no different than systemic capacity building and civil service issues in general.

Burundi, Economic Reform and Financial Transparency Assessment Program (2005-2006)

The Greeks of Burundi

EU Relations with Burundi

Burundi- Country Statistics

Assorted on Burundi Economics

Some items about the economy of Burundi from recent IMF reports and Government's letters of intents;

Fiscal policy is also geared to addressing debt sustainability concerns. Given Burundi’s debt burden, external financing of the budget should be strictly limited to grants and highly concessional loans.

The ratio of the government wage bill to GDP will decline less than anticipated in the medium term owing to higher payroll in the priority sectors, which are key for achieving progress toward the Millennium Development Goals. The ratio should remain below 11 percent of GDP toward the end of the program in 2011.

To contain the wage bill, the government will continue to draw on the findings of the Public Expenditure Management and Financial Accountability Review (PEMFAR) prepared jointly by the World Bank and the government of Burundi. In particular, with the census of civil servants having been completed and payroll management transferred to the Ministry of Finance, the government will proceed with the audit of the payroll to ensure that the calculated wages are indeed on a sound legal basis and that there are no abuses. This audit should precede the exercise to harmonize wages. To increase spending in the priority sectors, the government will implement a rationalization plan for nonpriority spending, in accordance with the PFM strategy.

Burundi will seek only concessional external financing or grants. The government will not contract nonconcessional foreign debt and will ensure that all loans contracted have a grant element of at least 50 percent. To make certain that the concessionality threshold is respected, the government will ensure compliance with the provision that the Ministry of Finance has the exclusive right to negotiate and sign external loans.

National Accounts
Serious deficiencies in real sector data handicap analysis and economic management. National accounts are compiled infrequently. Source data on agriculture, the most important activity, is inadequate. The Statistical Office (ISTEEBU) responsible for producing economic statistics and preparing national accounts has weak capacity. Since 1998 Burundi has reported annual national accounts estimates to the Fund with about a three-month lag, which are derived from a macroeconomic projection model maintained by the Ministry of Planning and Reconstruction. Recently, ISTEEBU has developed, with AFRISTAT’s help, a set of provisional national accounts for 2005, the new base year. This is a major effort because the last national accounts data were from 1998.

For Discussion: How reliable are their national accounts estimates and other statistics?

Burundi Fact of the Day

GDP per capita is about $139, and only 18 percent of the population has food security. The IMF and World Bank have cancelled more than 90 percent of Burundi's debt, worth about $1.4 billion.

-Burundi's Debt Relief Savings to Go to Food, Health, Schools

Assorted Reports

World Economic and Social Survey 2009: Promoting Development, Saving the Planet

Reconstructing Public Administration after Conflict

Achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in an Era of Global Uncertainty: Asia-Pacific Regional Report 2009/10

Women, Business and the Law 2010

Hidden Wealth of Nations

The Hidden Wealth of Nations by David Halpern
Table of Contents
Preface and Introduction.
Chapter One: Prosperity and wellbeing.
Chapter Two: Not getting along.
Chapter Three: The politics of virtue.
Chapter Four: Fairness and Inclusion.
Chapter Five: Power and Governance.
Chapter Six: Conclusion.

Randomised Trials for PFM Reforms?

Not quiet. Tim Harford has an interesting column urging governments to adopt randomised trials more widely.

Is Jamie Oliver right to emphasise healthy school meals? Run a trial. Should young offenders be sent to boot camp, or to meet victims of crime? Run a trial. What can we do to persuade households to use less electricity? Run a trial...

When the UK government recently introduced the “synthetic phonics” method of teaching young children to read, they were told by Carole Torgerson, an evaluation expert at the University of York, that they could easily bolster the slim evidence base by randomising which schools joined the programme first. They didn’t. (More encouragingly, Ms Torgerson has been commissioned to evaluate maths teaching.)

Some people feel queasy at talk of “experimentation” in the classroom, prison or benefit office – but politicians experiment on us all the time with their latest policy wheezes. We learn little or nothing because the experiments are badly designed.

What is missing is the political demand for tests of what really works. Too many policies on education, welfare and criminal justice are just so much homeopathy: cute-sounding stories about what works leaning more on faith than on evidence. Politicians and civil servants, faced with some fancy new idea, should get into the habit of asking for a proper randomised trial. And we, as citizens, should be equally demanding....

Trial registers also feed into systematic review bodies such as the Cochrane Collaboration, which is an international offshoot of a National Health Service initiative. In less than two decades, the Cochrane Collaboration has published 4,000 systematic reviews of medical treatments, digging up data from unpublished trials, and providing the information to save many lives. A parallel body for social policy has far fewer trials to evaluate

For Discussion: What are typical training programs on randomised trials for policy makers?

Related:
There is a smarter way to cut public spending

Executive Training: Evaluating Social Programs

Women Fact of the Day

Only 20 of 128 economies have equal legal rights for men and women in several important areas for entrepreneurs and workers, according to a new World Bank Group report, Women, Business and the Law 2010.

Strategic Sourcing- Can it work in Developing Countries

For Discussion: Do you think it can work in developing countries? Or would it lead to more corruption?

Increasing the use of strategic sourcing by agencies, where agencies band together to use their purchasing power to buy commodities – such as paper, copiers, and printers — at a discount.

PFM tools for the IT Age

I'm looking for examples of innovative use of government expenditure data.

Examples:
Where Does the Money Go?

Related;
Show Us a Better Way
Putting the Frontline First: Smarter Government

Assorted on Teaching and Education

Mathematica and Wolfram|Alpha Are Revolutionizing Education

Building a Better Teacher ;

He called a wedding videographer he knew through a friend and asked him if he’d like to tag along on some school visits. Their first trip to North Star Academy, a charter school in Newark, turned into a five-year project to record teachers across the country. At first, Lemov financed the trip out of his consulting budget; later, Uncommon Schools paid for it. The odyssey produced a 357-page treatise known among its hundreds of underground fans as Lemov’s Taxonomy. (The official title, attached to a book version being released in April, is “Teach Like a Champion: The 49 Techniques That Put Students on the Path to College.”)

I first encountered the taxonomy this winter in Boston at a training workshop, one of the dozens Lemov gives each year to teachers. Central to Lemov’s argument is a belief that students can’t learn unless the teacher succeeds in capturing their attention and getting them to follow instructions. Educators refer to this art, sometimes derisively, as “classroom management.” The romantic objection to emphasizing it is that a class too focused on rules and order will only replicate the power structure; a more common view is that classroom management is essential but somewhat boring and certainly less interesting than creating lesson plans. While some education schools offer courses in classroom management, they often address only abstract ideas, like the importance of writing up systems of rules, rather than the rules themselves. Other education schools do not teach the subject at all. Lemov’s view is that getting students to pay attention is not only crucial but also a skill as specialized, intricate and learnable as playing guitar.

Andrew Gelman on the above article

Teaching: What I Learned Last Semester

Teach Like a Champion: 49 Techniques that Put Students on the Path to College - Doug Lemov

Uncommon Schools

Podcasts:

The national curriculum
The first draft of a national curriculum in maths, English, science and history is now online for public consultation.It covers kindergarten to year 10, with the planned changes for years 11 and 12 to be added in April.

National curriculum: the English experience
A three-year review of primary education in England says that the national curriculum and national testing has narrowed schooling and placed too much emphasis on basic literacy and numeracy.

'Workforce Futures'
Skills Australia has handed over a report titled 'Australian Workforce Futures' to the Deputy Prime Minister, Julia Gillard. Skills Australia is an independent statutory body established to provide advice to the government on future skills.

Hoisted from Comments- World Bank's blogs

Thanks to Ryan Hahn for clarifying;

Almost all of the Bank's blogs can be seen in a single format here: http://blogs.worldbank.org. I believe the only exceptions are the PSD Blog and the new blog, All About Finance.

As a general point, I don't think it makes sense to think of all the blogs as a single unit. The Bank is a large institution with experts covering many different areas. If I want to read about finance, I'd rather not have a lot of information on, say, ICT mixed in.

The Winston Wolf of Public Management

An interesting profile of US Defense Secretary;

In his memoir Speech-less, Matt Latimer, a speechwriter for both Rumsfeld and Bush, describes Gates as "our Winston Wolf," the Harvey Keitel character in Pulp Fiction who comes to dispose of the bodies and take care of the bloody mess after an accidental killing. "Wolf was a case study of robotic efficiency, overseeing an elaborate cleanup while calmly drinking a cup of coffee," writes Latimer. "That's what President Bush wanted — a cold-blooded competent cleaner."

The cleaner quickly went to work. He walked into the Pentagon alone. Inheriting many former Rumsfeld aides, Gates told them on his first day that he wouldn't be firing anyone. There was no time for confirmations, and he was leaving that day for Iraq. Gates brought a sense of relief, a feeling that an adult was back in charge...

One of the things his staffers love about him is his common sense, I-don't-get-it attitude toward the stupidity of bureaucracy. Now that he's past worrying about climbing within that bureaucracy, he has the confidence to break it. At the height of the Iraq surge in 2007, which Gates supported, more than 100 soldiers a month were dying. It's almost impossible as an outsider to understand why the Pentagon would not want to build the mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles, known as MRAPs, that would have saved many of those soldiers' lives. Instead of budgeting for MRAPs, the Pentagon was still spending money on outdated weapon systems. So Gates bypassed the normal procurement process, created a special task force, went to Congress and got the money to build them. "Those vehicles saved hundreds of lives and limbs," says a senior Pentagon official...

The list of mindless bureaucratic obstacles that were hampering the war effort was dizzying. For example: military officers complained that there were not enough drones, Predators and unmanned reconnaissance in the air to help target insurgent cells. The holdup? Air Force pilots are taught to fly real planes, not drones. Each pilot costs about $1 million to train. And yet some staff sergeants in the Army had started operating the drones at a fraction of the price, with far fewer crashes. "If the Army is doing it safer and cheaper and able to produce more pilots faster, why aren't we doing it to that standard?" Gates asked. "This requires a cultural revolution in the Air Force," explained one of his staffers — which it got in 2008, after Gates fired the civilian and military leaders of the service for other reasons. Now the Air Force licenses junior officers to fly unmanned aircraft, and Gates has tripled the number of drones operating in the war zones...

Gates is a man of old-school habits: a Grey Goose at the end of the day and preferably steak or bacon cheeseburgers for lunch and dinner. He doesn't use a cell phone. He asked me during our interview if there was tape in my digital recorder. Gates keeps a box filled with index cards of quotes and anecdotes and one-liners he's collected over the years. His favorite comedians are both dead — George Carlin and W.C. Fields. Their sensibilities suit Gates' own — taking down institutions, puncturing pomp. He's even adopted some of their style. He loves to tell the same jokes about egos in Washington — "where people say, I'll double-cross that bridge when I get to it," and "the only place in the world you can see a prominent person walking down lovers' lane holding his own hand."...

At the height of the Iraq surge, Gates gave a speech to the Marine Corps Association. He began in Johnny Carson fashion with a long, meticulously timed story about Nixon's Secretary of Defense Mel Laird on a trip to see the Pope.

Laird was smoking a cigar, and Henry Kissinger told him to at least put it out before they went inside. "A couple of minutes into the Pope's remarks, Kissinger heard this little patting sound, and he looked over, and there was a wisp of smoke coming out of Laird's pocket. The Secretary of Defense was on fire. The American party heard this slapping and thought they were being cued to applaud. And so they did. And Henry later told us, 'God only knows what His Holiness thought, seeing the American Secretary of Defense immolating himself, and the entire American party applauding the fact.' "...

Like Obama, Gates can consume reams of information. His photographic memory is legendary. He is a voracious reader of history, spy novels and pulp fiction. He's subscribed to the Book-of-the-Month Club for 50 years. And he is careful, meticulously so. One decades-long colleague told me Gates will cancel a briefing if he hasn't done his homework. "Preparation for him is a cathartic experience," says his spokesman Morrell. He vents brutal answers to imaginary questions so he can be more diplomatic on the Hill. He's vigilant about the stagecraft of statecraft, even taking his own messy handwritten notes to meetings so his preparation can be seen...

What did Gates ask the President-elect? "I asked him if he could trust me."

The Silo of World Bank Blogs

Two new additions to the World Bank blogs:

Prospects for Development
All About Finance

Advice to World Bankers: Please consolidate your blogs- may be it's a reflection of the Bank's management style? What do you think readers? Do include settings for blogger feeds in all the blogs.

Currrent Favorite Authors at IMF/World Bank Joint Library:

Stiglitz, Joseph E/ Reinhart, Carmen M. / Collier, Paul / Eichengreen, Barry J.
/ Wooldridge, Jeffrey M. / Yusuf, Shahid, (World Bank Staff)/ Sen, Amartya /Baum, Christopher F. / Ahmad, Ehtisham / StataCorp LP / Shephard, Neil / Pozen, Robert C./ Hayek, Friedrich A. von (Friedrich August) / Greene, William H. / Gladwell, Malcolm / Fabozzi, Frank J. / Cameron, Adrian Colin