Due to poor civil engineering practices, corruption, natural disasters, the sabotage of infrastructure associated with Colombia’s armed conflict, and the politicisation of large infrastructure projects, Colombia is spending a significant amount annually on improving and rebuilding relatively new infrastructure. As the country’s population and economy continue to grow, so do its ...» more
Budgets and planning
Public procurement reform: assessing interventions aimed at improving transparency
This Rapid Evidence Assessment (REA) asks: what is the effectiveness of different interventions that aim to improve the transparency of public procurement? It also asks: What is the impact of improved procurement on accountability, anti-corruption and service delivery? Is it possible to produce key success criteria? An evidence base consisting of 48 studies, of high ...» more
Legislative oversight in public financial management
This Rapid Evidence Assessment examines the quality of the available evidence on the effectiveness of reforms aimed at improving legislative oversight to attain improved development outcomes, and summarises the available lessons from the literature. The specific research questions considered are: What is the effectiveness of the different public finance legislative ...» more
Measuring the performance of PFM systems
Government budgets and their supporting systems – often referred to as Public Financial Management (PFM) systems – are one of the key tools that governments use to turn policy statements and intentions into the delivery of goods and services. In fact, much of what governments do depends on raising, borrowing and spending public resources. Interest…» more
Gender responsive budgeting
Gender responsive budgeting (GRB) brings together two issues that are not commonly associated with one another: gender equality and public financial management. GRB argues that gender equality principles should be incorporated into all stages of the budget process. GRB initiatives seek to improve the results of budgets in general, and gender equality and women’s empowerment…» more
Designing and monitoring PFM reform programmes
The PEFA framework is the most comprehensive assessment instrument. It provides indicators to measure all dimensions of a PFM system. While PEFA assessments are now in wide usage, other diagnostic instruments and tools – like the IMF Fiscal Transparency Code and various World Bank and OECD tools – are used alongside them for more specific purposes. Alternatively, ...» more
Pro-poor national budgets
There is a wealth of evidence that spending on basic social services (health, nutrition, education) and social protection can be progressive and reach the poor, with particularly high potential returns from expenditures in these sectors reaching poor and vulnerable women and children. In recent years, empirical research has reinvigorated interest in the potential poverty ...» more
Examples of PFM impacts on gender equality
Research for this report was unable to find conclusive cases where public financial management (PFM) reform led to impacts on gender equality. This is because PFM reform does not necessarily lead to gender equality impacts, and conversely improvements in gender equality do not always require, or follow on from, PFM reform. It may also be that gender impacts are rarely covered ...» more
Incentives for gender responsive budgeting
It is difficult to conclusively evaluate the impact of gender responsive budgeting (GRB) on gender outcomes and in turn the impact of incentives on GRB and on women’s empowerment more widely. This is both due to a limited evidence base about impact and to the complexity in assessing and interpreting impact (Combaz, 2013). Literature on GRB is primarily prescriptive and there ...» more
Practical guidance to integrate gender into public financial management
A medium-sized body of rigorous literature provides guidance on how to integrate gender into PFM systems successfully. Guidance on effective approaches: - Overall requirements are: securing the known enabling factors (such as sustained political support, sufficient capacities and conducive institutional arrangements); adapting to context; involving a range of stakeholders ...» more
Increasing financial investment in women and girls through gender responsive budgeting
Overall, evidence indicates that it is difficult to attribute financial change to GRB initiatives. There are a limited range of impacts attributed to GRB, however less specific details provided on why initiatives have been successful. Drawing from the literature that is available, some of the identified successes, and factors contributing to their success, include: South ...» more
Impact of gender-responsive budgeting
Gender-responsive budgeting has been applied by a few dozen developing countries since the mid-1980s, though to very different extents and in diverse forms. It is difficult to identify what its impact has been on gender outcomes and on resource distribution within government, due to a limited evidence base and to complexity in assessing and interpreting impact. Nevertheless, ...» more
Budget accountability and participation
Experts agree that the evidence base on budget transparency, accountability and participation is limited and underdeveloped. However there are a growing number of case studies and meta-analyses covering a wide geographic scope and diverse contexts, with a variety of methods and gender sensitivity. Key findings from the evidence include the following: There are examples ...» more
Estimating the ‘legitimate’ percentage of annual military expenditures
Key findings: There are no frameworks that estimate a ‘legitimate’ annual percentage of military expenditure for countries. Legitimacy is often highly contested, and arms-importing and -exporting countries can differ, quite significantly, in their opinions on whether an arms transfer is legitimate and justified, or not. An internal needs assessment may outline different ...» more
Examples of successful fuel subsidy removal
Where fuel prices are controlled and subsidised by the government, price increases have often met with broad public opposition and, in some cases, violent demonstration. Where governments have been successful they have needed to ensure that reform was politically feasible and the impact on influential groups was mitigated. There are a number of countries which have instituted ...» more
Effects of decentralisation on social spending
Decentralisation and devolution to locally elected forms of government is often promoted as a means of: 1. giving local citizens and their representatives more decision-making power (political decentralisation); 2. redistributing authority, responsibilities and resources among different levels of government (administrative decentralisation); and 3. localising authority over ...» more
Budget Support and Civil Society
The following points are repeatedly made in the literature with regard to civil society engagement in the context of budget support: The key role for civil society in PRBS is in holding government to account, along with parliament. Donors providing budget support to governments have tended to simultaneously provide support to civil society to strengthen their capacities ...» more
The impact of the financial crisis on conflict and state fragility in sub-saharan Africa
Sub-Saharan Africa was largely insulated from the initial stages of the financial crisis as the majority of the countries in the region are de-linked from the international financial markets. However, with the worsening of the global financial and economic crisis, the region as a whole has now been exposed to the downturn, and growth estimates have been continually lowered from ...» more
Long-term Economic Planning
There are no empirical studies on the relationship between planning and economic growth. Country growth diagnostics focus on the substance of economic policy. They rarely discuss the policymaking process, let alone the timeframe over which economies are planned, as a factor in determining the success or failure of economic reforms. Botswana, Ireland and South Korea are among ...» more
