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

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

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

Assorted

The Physics of Curling

What’s Wrong with the Obama Job Loss Graphic?

Keep testing the kids

Welcoming the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform

The simple money supply multiplier model and simple keynesian multiplier model

Using Simple Statistics to Detect Cheating

How to write an essay

CPI + Velocity = Trouble

Beauty’s Daughter

Why the Conservatives should win in UK!

I liked Cameron's promise of putting all government contracts online, and putting details of all government expenditures above 25k online.

Key Words: Post-Bureaucratic Age, Behavioral Economics, Politics and Human Nature, Transparency, Accountability, Choice Architecture, Missouri Accountability Portal,

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.

Assorted on Privatization

Privatization- Zombie Economics (John Quiggin)

Shri Vijay Kelkar,Chairman, Finance Commission spoke on the topic ‘On Strategies for Disinvestment and Privatisation’

OECD vs Fund's Relationship Management

OECD (2008) compares OECD peer reviews with IMF Board discussions and describes differences in focus, in methods of analysis and consequently, in the nature of interactions. The IMF process is characterized as a higher frequency exercise with a shorter-term focus and notes that the country is not necessarily expected to endorse the policy recommendations of a surveillance report, nor does it have much latitude to change or remove topics from a Staff Report. The OECD, on the other hand, engages in a much more intensive exchange with country authorities, both in missions and at headquarters when finalizing its Economic Surveys. It engages in a full day of discussions with the authorities joined by officials from other countries who contribute to the debate with their policy experience, after which the Secretariat works with the country subject to peer review over the course of a full day to finalize the document for publication. Thygesen acknowledges that this buy-in may result in a reduction of clarity in issues or key messages in the report. He also suggests that the peer review process only works well if there is a high and matched level of expertise brought by country representatives around the table so that the authorities undergoing the peer review can truly benefit from the discussion. OECD (2007) discusses the prerequisites of value sharing, mutual trust and credibility in the process adding that the peer review is as effective as the “peer pressure” stemming from the reviewer countries, and the willingness of the reviewed country to accept it

-A Comparative Study on Relationship Management

Another Practitioner- Rakesh Mohan's Eichengreen challenge

Monetary Policy in a Globalized Economy- A Practitioner's View

Rakesh Mohan

Ashok Mody review;

In a recent comment, Barry Eichengreen (2009) says that economists are subject to fads and trends because the penalties for departing from social norms are large. Hence, even though the tools and perspectives to question the prevailing normative view are available, the incentives to adopt them are minimal...

Rakesh Mohan sees such pragmatism as the key role of a practising economist. It is in the practice of economics that the rubber, so to speak, hits the road, the theories are tested, the validity of parameters is assessed, and the cold reality of politics is faced. He speaks of the recurring conflicts in objectives faced by policymakers. In resolving these conflicts, he questions and prods, often pushing back on views widely held by academic and other practising economists. In his practice, Mohan reports, the Eichengreen challenge was always present. But because the risk of being marginalised is high, bucking the orthodoxy requires clarity of perspective and determined persistence. Both of these are amply in view in this book, which brings the speeches Mohan delivered as deputy governor of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) from the early years of this decade, along with an extensive introduction and an “after word” that reports on the ongoing global financial and economic crisis...

For students of the Indian economy who also seek a special understanding of India’s monetary and financial policies, this book will be an invaluable guide. It presents a careful and current account of developments with an analytical eye, placed in the context and language of ongoing international policy debates. For readers seeking to assess the pulse and rhythm of India’s ginger steps from the safety of domestic finance to the choppier waters of international finance, the book offers a calibrated prognosis.

Development Jobs

World Bank Job Offer: Public Financial Management Specialist

The closing date:February 14, 2010

MIGA Professionals Program (MPP)
Looking for a Risk Officer, Accounting Office, and Underwriter

Marco-Fiscal Advisor- Afghanistan
Deloitte
Apply By: 11 February 2010

The Advisor will:

* Review appropriateness of MOF macroeconomic model for macro-fiscal analysis and forecasting.
* Review the process for integrating the MOF macroeconomic model to the revenue projections model and medium term fiscal framework (MTFF)
* Document data requirements for model and assist MOF in developing MOU's with DAB and statistical agency for the periodic provision of updated data for the model.
* Develop manuals and training materials to assist in building the knowledge and expertise of MOF staff in use of the Macroeconomic model.
* Provide coaching, formal training and mentoring to MOF staff in the use of the model.

Institutional Development Expert - Sri Lanka
Sinclair Knight Merz
Apply By: 20 January 2010

Namibia - Support to the National Planning Commission Secretariat
ECORYS
Apply By: 11 February 2010

ADB has a lot of anticipated vacancies for economists and PFM experts

Blog of the Day

Running a Hospital- President and CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston

Who is Chalmers Johnson?

The idea of the Developmental State is most closely associated with Chalmers Johnson and his seminal analysis of Japan’s very rapid, highly successful post-war reconstruction and reindustrialization. Johnson’s central contention was that Japan’s quite remarkable and historically unparalleled industrial renaissance was neither a fluke nor inevitable, but a consequence of the efforts of a Developmental State. A developmental state was one that was determined to influence the direction and pace of economic development by directly intervening in the development process, rather than relying on the uncoordinated influence of market forces to allocate resources. The developmental state took it upon itself the task of establishing substantive social and economic goals with which to guide the process of development and social mobilization. The most important of these goals, in Japan’s case, of course was the reconstruction of its industrial capacity, a process made easier by widespread consensus about the importance of industrial development.
The emphasis has to be placed on the influence over the direction and pace of development by directly intervening in the development process, rather than relying on the uncoordinated influence of market forces.

- Address by the Minister in The Presidency: National Planning Commission, Trevor Manuel, at the Wits Graduate School of Public Development Management

For Discussion: Where's South Africa heading?

Assorted

Landsburg's Heroes of All Time

66 percent of the time

And it also occurred me that while students see the professor while he or she is teaching, they only witness about 66% of what goes into teaching.

Medical Statistics Don't Always Mean What They Seem to Mean

Paul Romer's Errors

Experiments in industrial policy

As much as fixed costs matter, the real barrier to firm growth in poor countries could be management. A good manager is partly one with training, experience, and a sense of best practice. A lot of a factory’s success comes down to management as a technology, though. Organizing a production floor, ensuring quality and efficient production: these are less a product of a single manager’s talent and more the product of decades of trial and error in manufacturing plants around the world. The problem: if you are running a firm in India or Mexico or elsewhere, the best practices probably haven’t filtered through.

2009 Quality of Life Index

Balance of Payments

The Budget Director's Love Life

There is something that a lot of people in Washington find shocking about this story, which is why we keep talking about it,” Ms. Ein said. “This is a person who seems so controlled in his professional life.” Indeed, someone who carries neat to-do lists in his breast pocket and a copy on his desk of Epictetus, the Greek philosopher who preached self-discipline. “And yet he’s so messy in his private life. This is an a-ha moment.”

This goes to another obvious — and recurring — question: whether someone whose personal life has become so complicated is really fit to tackle one of the most demanding, important and stressful jobs in the universe. “Frankly I don’t see how Orszag can balance three families and the national budget,” wrote Joel Achenbach of The Washington Post.

-If Peter Orszag Is So Smart, What Will He Do Now?

Recently from World Bank

Malaysia economic monitor : repositioning for growth

Syrian Arab Republic - Electricity sector strategy note

Azerbaijan - Country economic memorandum : a new silk road - export-led diversification

Lithuania - Social sectors public expenditure review

Tanzania - Public expenditure review of the water sector

Mexico - Agriculture and rural development public expenditure review

Doing privatization right

Public-Private Partnership units : what are they, and what do they do

Reform teams

Seychelles - Public expenditure review

Legal frameworks for tertiary education in Sub-Saharan Africa : the quest for institutional responsiveness

Comparing European and U.S. securities regulations : MiFID versus corresponding U.S. regulations

Accounting for growth in Latin America and the Caribbean : improving corporate financial reporting to support regional economic development

Uzbekistan - Assessment of the primary health care reform : transparency, accountability, and efficiency

Organization of Eastern Caribbean States - Increasing linkages of tourism with the agriculture, manufacturing, and service sectors

The Afghanistan investment climate in 2008 : growth despite poor governance, weak factor markets, and lack of innovation

Costa Rica - Competitiveness diagnostic and recommendations

Assorted

Islamic Credit Default Swaps

Pop singer makes two excellent points on development

What’s the United States Worth? $1.4 Quadrillion

Soviet Growth & American Textbooks

The flow of economic thought – Jan Tinbergen vs Milton Friedman;

“It is a little superfluous for any foreigner to come to Rotterdam to lecture about economics at all. I feel a bit like a 17th century New England smuggler lecturing on seamanship to Admiral Tromp. The trade in economics nowadays is as much the other way: we send our young men to Rotterdam to learn, not our middle-aged professors to teach. Indeed some of our best middle-aged professors are named Koopmans and Houthakker! I suppose the logic of the situation is that I am not import at all; I am to be processed and re-exported, like cocoa beans.”
-Robert M. Solow in 1963 when visiting the Rotterdam School of Economics.

Books about Iceland

Why Iceland?: How One of the World’s Smallest Countries Became the Meltdown’s Biggest Casualty by Asgeir Jonsson

Frozen Assets: How I Lived Iceland’s Boom and Bust, by Armann Thorvaldsson,

Meltdown Iceland: Lessons on the World Financial Crisis from a Small Bankrupt Island
-Roger Boyes

BH Economics Blogs Awards 2009

It is out and congratulations to the winners.

Assorted

Everything is a project, even this

How to keep meetings short: 5 tricks

Life's trade-offs in 10 easy principles

Economics and voter irrationality: my review of The Myth of the Rational Voter

A bouquet of fallacies from Gary Becker and Stephen Dubner

According to the economic approach, therefore, most (if not all!) deaths are to some extent "suicides" in the sense that they could have been postponed if more resources had been invested in prolonging life.

The Prospects for Global Imbalances: A View from the IMF

Five questions on asset prices and monetary policy

On a Scale of One to Four, How Happy Are You?

Data Mining: Course Materials (Fall 2009)

A Way to Share in a Nation’s Growth

Learning from bad graphs and weak analysis

The Gospel of thrift

The Hidden History of the Health Care Bill

Best Development Idea of 2009

World Bank should take heed:

Paul Romer's Charter Cities

The Age of the Dashboard!

Assorted about Public Sector Dashboards.



Dashboards - A Downloadable "How To" Guide

Using Performance Measures

The Federal IT Dashboard-The Status Quo Is No Longer Acceptable !

OMB’s New Performance Principles;

He also noted the use of management dashboards, such as the IT Dashboard, and said “We plan similar dashboards for other common government functions, including procurement, financial management, and personnel management.” He also said OMB will look for ways to make agency Performance and Accountability Reports more useful. The Department of the Interior’s report may be a useful model.

Memo to IMF's Fiscal Affairs Department: You guys need to have a close watch over the innovative ways the new US administration is dealing with performance management- some of their ideas are replicable in many developing countries.

Performance Reporting Case Studies

Australia

The Australian government introduced an Outcomes and Outputs Framework as the basis for budgeting and reporting for public sector agencies in 1999–2000. Among the main elements of the framework are:
• Specification of what the government is trying to achieve (outcomes);
• Specification of how actual deliverables will assist in achieving the outcomes (outputs); and
• Annual performance reporting of agencies’ contribution to the achievement of outcomes and the delivery of outputs (Australian National Audit Office, 2007, p. 15). Annual reports to Parliament detail the degree to which plans for the coming budget year are realized and targeted performance is achieved.

Canada
Canada has had an Improved Reporting to Parliament project running since the 1990s. Thirteen broad Government of Canada outcomes are specified, and agencies must develop clearly defined and measurable strategic outcomes that link in to these over-arching outcomes. Departmental performance reports are intended to provide a comprehensive but succinct picture of departmental performance, as it compares against the strategic outcomes, through the reporting of program activities linked to the strategic outcomes (Treasury Board of Canada, 2007). An effort is being made to refocus reporting away from governmental out¬puts to higher-level outcomes that show how agencies make a difference to citizens.

Ireland
In Budget 2006, the Minister for Finance indicated that the government had decided that, starting in 2007, individual departments would publish an annual state¬ment on the outputs and objectives of their depart-ments, and from 2008, the actual out-turns. These statements (named output statements) are presented to the relevant parliamentary committee along with the department’s annual estimates. Guidance from the Department of Finance suggests that, with regard to reporting on performance, a small number of high-level goals per department—each with a macro level outcome indicator—should be complemented by a small number of more detailed output indica¬tors which should, where possible, be quantitative in nature; otherwise, qualitative.

United States
The Government Performance and Results Act of 1993 requires federal agencies to produce strategic plans, annual performance plans, and annual performance and accountability reports (PARs). These are aimed at establishing a system of accountability whereby agencies articulate what they are trying to achieve, how they will accomplish it, and how Congress and the public will know if they are succeeding (Breul, 2007, p. 313). Goals and objectives need to be stated as outcomes, and performance indicators must be valid indicators of the impact on outcome goals (Department of Energy, 2006).

For more read, a report by Richard Boyle, Head of Research for the Institute of Public Administration in Dublin, 'Performance Reporting: Insights from International Practice'

One lesson:

there is a clear distinction between performance reports in the US and those in other countries he examined. On the whole, indicators contained in US reports are more likely to report on outcomes, be quantitative in nature, meet data quality criteria, and have associated targets and multi-year baseline data.

Related;
Performance Reporting - Good Practices Handbook

PFM Books

The Many Faces of Public Management Reform in the Asia-Pacific Region;

During the past decade, globalization and democratization have been the major forces that helped transform the structures, functions, and processes of Asian public sectors. Nevertheless, these transformation efforts of Asian countries vary considerably depending on local context, and have met with different degrees of success. Some countries experienced smooth transformations. For others, the reform process has been more volatile. These issues were explored at a conference July 7-9, 2008 in Bangkok, Thailand, hosted by the Faculty of Political Science, Chulalongkorn University, and co-sponsored by the International Public Management Network, the Asia-Pacific Governance Institute, and Thailand Democracy Watch. This book presents some of the works contributed by participating scholars and practitioners at the conference. The contents fall into three categories: corruption and anti-corruption initiatives, public financial management reforms, and public management reforms with emphasis on performance and results.

Editor are Clay Wescott, Bidhya Bowornwathana, L.R. Jones,

Highly recommended:
World Bank, 2008. Public Sector Reform: What Works and Why? An IEG Evaluation of World Bank Support.

Risks of too Open Government? Not at all

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Theory v. Practice - TSA Leak
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

Related:
Task Force on Government Performance

Open Government Initiative