Another Index

HUMAN OPPORTUNITY INDEX

An American Hero in Government Openness

Daniel Ellsberg

Seven years and almost 50,000 American deaths later, after I had leaked the Pentagon Papers, I had a conversation with Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon, one of the two senators who had voted against the Tonkin Gulf resolution in August 1964. If I had leaked the documents then, he said, the resolution never would have passed.

That was hard to hear. But in 1964 it hadn't occurred to me to break my vow of secrecy. Though I knew that the war was a mistake, my loyalties then were to the secretary of defense and the president. It took five years of war before I recognized the higher loyalty all officials owe to the Constitution, the rule of law, the soldiers in harm's way or their fellow citizens.

For Civil Servants: What would you do in such situations?

Related;
Ellsberg paradox
A most ingenious paradox

Risk, Ambiguity, and the Savage Axioms;

A discussion of a class of situations in which many reasonable people neither wish nor tend to conform to the Savage postulates of rational behavior. There is no way to infer meaningful probabilities for events, even approximately or qualitatively, from their choices in these situations, nor can they be described as acting as if they were maximizing the mathematical expectation of utility, in terms of any probabilities whatever. None of the familiar criteria for predicting or prescribing decisionmaking under uncertainty corresponds to this pattern of choices. Yet the behavior is deliberate and orderly, and it can be described in terms of a simple, specified decision rule. Such self-consistent behavior violating the Savage axioms seems to occur in situations that can be described as highly ambiguous. In reaching a decision under these circumstances, many people seem to act conservatively. Without actually expecting the worst, they choose to act as if the worst outcomes were somewhat more likely than their best estimates of likelihood would indicate.

What is EITI?

A brief introduction to the initiative from Peter Eigen;


Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative

Related;

Peter Eigen tells his story of starting Transparency International, a coalition of business, government, and citizen organizations in more than 85 countries that exposes and fights corruption.

Mauritius Government Finance Statistics- Data Quality

ROSC- Data Module for Mauritius was recently posted by the IMF. The recommendations on government finance statistics are well worth a look;

• Legally/officially assign the responsibility to compile GFS for the general government to the CSO.
• Strengthen and increase staff resources for work on GFS
• Inform the users of the internal approval processes of the data
• Prepare a detailed migration path and obtain official approval for implementing GFSM 2001.
• Continue work on improving the timeliness of source data by obtaining an agreement on the timely provision of data from all major source data providers.
• Improve the timeliness of the general government operations data.
• Regularly check for consistency between GFS and monetary data and prepare a reconciliation table.
• Explain the revision policy in the GFS publication
• Prepare and disseminate advance release calendars for central government operations and outstanding central government debt.

On the capacity side;

The CSO has four staff positions dedicated to the compilation of annual GFS for the general government sector and in cooperation with the MOFED the functional classification of budgetary central government expenditure on a quarterly basis. These staff also are assigned to compile quarterly general government statistics for the national accounts. Resources are limited; in particular staff resources are constrained taking into account the current migration from the methodology described in the GFSM 1986 to the methodology described in the Government Finance Statistics Manual, 2001 (GFSM 2001). While computer resources seem adequate at the moment, any additional demands could over-extend these resources.

On-the-job and external training have been available to the MOFED and CSO staff. Formal internal training has not been provided. Some staff have attended external training on the GFSM 1986 and on the GFSM 2001.

Significant progress to automate government finance compilation procedures has been achieved recently through the implementation of the Treasury Accounting System (TAS) used by the Accountant-General to follow the cash flows of the budgetary central government. However, this process needs to be extended to other areas of the general government. Data for non-budgetary central government and local governments are input manually. A new chart of accounts, based on the GFSM2001, is currently being prepared and is expected to be implemented as from the financial year 2008/09.

Assorted

Seminar on financial management information systems

IMF to prepare Guidelines for Fiscal Risk Disclosure and Management

Fiscal Policy Taining for USAID staff and host-country partners