Browse by: "2003"

The writing of this paper, is in reference to my contribution in Can Governments Learn?, one of the books published by the International Evaluation Research Group. My immediate and first reaction was that it is of course always very nice to be asked to contribute for a distinguished audience. My second reaction was to ask myself when my essay in Can Governments Learn? was really written and what questions it dealt with; and perhaps even more, what was the answer to the question which constitutes the title of the book. The need to ask the latter questions had of course something to do with the answer to the first question, namely that the essay was written about 10 years ago. It was therefore obvious that the discussion in this book in a more technical sense had to be updated, but also had to take into account both some new empirical material and the discussion within a couple of intellectual fields. The title of this current paper implies several questions: to what degree politicians and administrators learn from evaluations, and also to what degree learning takes place among the evaluators themselves. These questions create a sort of strategic problem. Am I going to give the answer at the beginning of my paper or perhaps later? But perhaps I will compromise: I will start with a short version of the answer now, but elaborate on the answer later...

La politique macroéconomique du Japon a fluctué entre expansions et assainissements budgétaires pendant les années 90. Les efforts déployés pour rétablir l’équilibre des finances publiques ont culminé dans la Loi de 1997 sur la réforme structurelle des finances publiques, qui articulait plusieurs objectifs budgétaires dans une perspective à moyen terme. Cette loi a toutefois été suspendue un an seulement après son adoption en raison d’un ralentissement économique qui a fait craindre aux responsables politiques qu’un assainissement des finances publiques n’aggrave encore la situation économique du pays. Plusieurs programmes de relance économique adoptés en une dizaine d’années pour ramener l’économie sur le sentier d’une croissance autonome se sont élevés à un total supérieur à 130 000 milliards de yens sur la base du coût des projets envisagés2. L’économie japonaise ne s’est toutefois pas redressée ce qui fait que ces politiques budgétaires discrétionnaires ont considérablement aggravé le déséquilibre budgétaire et porté la dette publique à plus de 140 % du PIB en 2002...

Federal budget procedures in the United States require forecasts and projections over several distinct periods of time: short term (18-24 months ahead), medium term (both 5- and 10-year horizons), and long term (as much as 75 years in the future). In the United States, the intermediate estimates have taken on increased significance with many press accounts referring to 10-year estimates. In addition to various time periods, the forecasts include the outlook for both the economy and the budget. Economic forecasts not only drive the budgetary outlook, they also provide the basis for developing economic policy. And despite the linkage between economic and budgetary performance, the relationships are neither perfect nor constant. The status of these two requirements has evolved, particularly since the enactment of the Budget Act in 1974 creating the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). The Executive branch forecasts (done mainly by the Office of Management and Budget, OMB) tend to parallel the time periods. Often many of the economic results are similar, especially over a 10-year forecast; the budget estimates vary more widely...

The last Development Assistance Committee (DAC) Review of Canada’s development co-operation, held in January 1998, highlighted Canada’s special ability to help lead the international community towards action which pushes out the frontiers of international co-operation. At the same time it noted that, in the context of a fundamental fiscal adjustment to respond to its domestic public debt burden, Canada’s aid budget had been cut by 29% over six years, more than in any other area of Canadian public spending. As a result, Canada’s official development assistance effort (as measured by the ODA/GNI ratio) had declined steeply from 0.45% at the beginning of the 1990s and was projected to fall below 0.30% by the end of the decade. (In fact, partly reflecting fast growth in Canada’s gross national income (GNI), the ODA/GNI ratio fell to 0.25% in 2000 and 0.22% in 2001). The DAC pointed out that these trends had created a paradox at the heart of Canada’s internationalism, given the continuing determination to be involved in a very wide range of issues and with as wide a range of partners as possible. This paradox raised concerns about Canada’s ability to meet expectations, both at home and abroad, for its role in the world...

Le processus budgétaire de l’administration fédérale des États-Unis est différent de celui des autres pays membres de l’OCDE. La raison en est la division rigoureuse des pouvoirs qui caractérise le régime constitutionnel américain de même qu’un long parcours historique marqué par l’ajout successif de nouvelles institutions. Le processus budgétaire présidentiel a commencé à se développer au début du siècle précédent. Il a été codifié pour la première fois en 1921 dans une loi intitulée Budget and Accounting Act, laquelle exigeait que le Président soumette au Congrès un budget pour le gouvernement et créait le Bureau of the Budget, devenu depuis l’Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Dans les années 70, le Congrès a modifié son propre processus budgétaire au moyen d’une loi intitulée Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act. Adoptée en 1974, cette loi créait la résolution budgétaire du Congrès et établissait le Congressional Budget Office (CBO). Une nouvelle institution s’est ajoutée au cours des années 1980 dans le but de contrôler le déficit. Il s’agit de la loi intitulée Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act, connue sous le nom de Loi Gramm-Rudman-Hollings qui a été adoptée en 1985. Elle a été modifiée en profondeur en 1990 par la Budget Enforcement Act...

Budgeting is a rule-driven process that regulates the raising and spending of public money. Detailed rules govern the submission of bids for resources by spending units, review of these bids by the Finance Ministry or another central organ, compilation of the annual budget, legislative action including the voting of appropriations, expenditure of funds during the financial year, and reporting on financial stocks and flows. Why have many national governments adopted new budget rules when they have a plethora of old ones? The new rules do not replace – although they may modify – existing rules, thereby adding to the complexity of established budget processes, and often adding as well to the time it takes to complete the main steps in the annual budget cycle. Why add to the complications of an already difficult process? If it is because the old rules do not work, why is it expected that new ones will make much of a difference? Furthermore, the old rules generally empower budget-makers by enabling them to allocate resources according to the preferences of government. Fiscal rules, by contrast, constrain budget-makers, taking away much of their authority to decide aggregate revenue and spending policy. These rules typically prescribe the balance between revenue and spending policy. Every fiscal rule is a limit on the exercise of political will. Why have democracies accepted or imposed fiscal limits on themselves, and why should we expect these limits to be effective when they run counter to the preferences of voters and politicians?...

La question qui se pose est « comment les autorités publiques cernentelles les changements dans leur environnement qui influent sur les résultats de leurs politiques et de leurs actions, et comment développent-elles leur capacité de procéder en temps voulu aux ajustements qu’il leur faut apporter à leur action et aux services publics ? » Réponse rapide : « très difficilement, même si les autorités compétentes le font parfois sur certains points. » La capacité d’adaptation dynamique des autorités publiques touche, d’une façon ou d’une autre, pratiquement tous les aspects importants de l’appareil politique et administratif. Elle dépend de l’articulation de la rationalité de l’analyse de l’action publique et de la gestion publique avec la rationalité de la vie politique. Elle consiste à créer un environnement où l’exercice des pouvoirs est bien organisé et où les affaires sont bien gérées. Elle suppose l’accord des différentes conceptions de l’intérêt général ou simplement la conciliation des intérêts particuliers. Elle suppose que se nouent des liens efficaces entre les clients des autorités publiques, d’une part, et les institutions et politiques publiques, d’autre part. En dernière analyse, il s’agit de l’efficacité de la démocratie et, dans un pays donné, du choix des gouvernements successifs des modalités d’exercice de leurs pouvoirs constitutionnels et de l’efficacité générale de ce choix au service des intérêts des citoyens en régime démocratique...

La préparation du budget fédéral aux États-Unis exige qu’on fasse des prévisions et projections sur plusieurs périodes de durées différentes : court terme (de 18 à 24 mois), moyen terme (de 5 ans et de 10 ans) et long terme (jusqu’à 75 ans). Aux États-Unis les estimations intermédiaires revêtent une importance croissante, et dans la presse on parle souvent d’estimations pour 10 ans. En dehors des différentes durées, les prévisions contiennent les perspectives à la fois pour l’économie et pour le budget. Non seulement les prévisions économiques dictent les perspectives budgétaires, mais elles servent également de fondement à l’élaboration de la politique économique. Malgré le lien qui existe entre la performance économique et la performance budgétaire, ce ne sont pas des relations parfaites ni constantes. Ces diverses exigences ont évolué, particulièrement depuis la mise en application de la Budget Act en 1974, donnant lieu à la création du Congressional Budget Office (CBO). Les prévisions de l’exécutif (préparées surtout par l’Office of Management and Budget, OMB) ont tendance à s’accorder avec les durées. Souvent la plupart des résultats économiques sont similaires, surtout pour des prévisions sur 10 ans ; les estimations budgétaires varient de manière plus importante...

The question is “how do governments identify important changes in their environment affecting the result of their policies and actions and develop capacity to make appropriate and timely adjustments in public policy and services?”. The short answer is “with great difficulty, although competent governments do so on some of the issues some of the time”. Successful dynamic adaptive behaviour in government involves virtually every significant feature of the system of government in some way. It is about how the rationality of policy analysis and public management comes together with the rationality of politics. It is about creating an environment which has good governance and good management. It involves resolution of disputes among competing views of the public interest or simply among competing private interests. It involves the effectiveness of the relationships between the government’s constituents and the institutions and policies of government. At the deepest level it is about effective democracy and how in any country a sequence of governments over time choose to exercise their constitutional authorities and whether they do this effectively in some wider sense of serving the best interests of their citizens in a system of democratic accountability...

Governments cannot afford to overlook a ground swell that is currently transforming companies, and more especially big companies. It is important that governments draw the appropriate conclusions, not by seeking to “copy” the private sector, but by endeavouring to innovate in accordance with their own identity and specificity and in accordance with their own way of managing their human resources. The following issue paper is in three parts: the first part briefly describes the ground swell, which is commonly known as knowledge management; the second part shows why this movement is also of significance for the public sector; the third part makes proposals with a view to initiating a debate capable of turning into a genuine action programme affecting government over the coming years...

L’État-nation contemporain existe pour être performant, pour fournir au peuple une aide financière, des services publics et d’autres prestations. La hauteur des performances de l’administration influe sur le bien-être économique et social des citoyens, l’état d’esprit des électeurs qui entrent dans l’isoloir, les programmes et le comportement des hommes politiques et des bureaucrates et les relations entre gouvernants et gouvernés. La mission de l’État moderne ne se limite pas à fournir des services et à faire des chèques, puisqu’il conserve ses fonctions traditionnelles de gardien, par exemple en défendant le pays contre les menaces extérieures et en maintenant à l’intérieur la santé publique, la sécurité et l’ordre. Ces missions restent certes essentielles, mais dans la plupart des États-nations, elles ont été surclassées dans l’esprit des citoyens et dans les comptes de l’administration par une gamme de services publics beaucoup plus étendue que celle fournie il y a 20 ou 40 ans. L’administration n’accomplit pas seulement davantage de tâches que par le passé, elle remplit la plupart d’entre elles différemment. L’une des idées principales du présent rapport est que l’État performant est par nature un État en transition, qui doit s’adapter à l’évolution des conditions et des opportunités. La performance n’est pas une mesure statique ; elle exige une rétroaction continue entre la situation et les résultats d’une part et les politiques et l’action d’autre part. Parmi les nombreuses transformations qui ont touché l’État performant, il faut citer celles qui concernent son rôle d’unification du peuple au travers de symboles et d’actions qui forgent l’identité nationale commune. Au fur et à mesure que la prestation des services prenait de l’importance, la diversité gagnait du terrain sur l’uniformité, du fait que les citoyens ne veulent pas ou n’ont pas tous besoin des mêmes services. L’État performant doit servir les citoyens, même s’il lui faut pour cela ne pas tous les servir de la même manière...

In this paper I want to address some fundamental questions concerning the nature of knowledge about public management reform, and particularly its transferability between countries and contexts. My main point will be that knowledge of what works and what does not tends to be heavily contextdependent. That is to say, a technique or organisational structure which succeeds in one place may fail in another. So – to put it bluntly – there is no set of general tools that can be transferred from one jurisdiction to another, all around the world, with confidence that they will work well every time. This means we have to look carefully at contexts, and at the “terms of trade” each time we are thinking of borrowing a good management idea from somewhere else. This is not a “how-to-do-it” paper. Rather it is a series of reflections on the nature of the “trade” in public management reforms, drawing on the existing academic literature and seeking to identify issues where further work seems to be desirable...

Many African countries are benefiting from reductions in their external debt. One important objective is to redirect the budgetary resources released from servicing external debt towards poverty-reducing expenditures. Several questions arise in this context. First, are the public expenditure management (PEM) systems of African countries robust enough to allow specific povertyreducingexpenditures to be identified in annual budgets and tracked in countries’ accounting systems? Second, does the expenditure control system allow poverty-reducing expenditures to be protected from cuts should there be unforeseen shortfalls in revenues? Third, are internal and external audit mechanisms effective, so as to ensure the integrity of expenditure reports, both in-year and annually? To answer these and other questions, an assessment of the entire PEM system is required in each country. Such a study has already been prepared.1 During 2001, the PEM systems of 24 low-income countries were assessed based on a common set of 15 questions in the areas of budget preparation, budget execution, and fiscal reporting. Figure 1 shows the results for two regions of Africa (Anglophone countries and Francophone countries) – well below what is required to meet the objectives of effective PEM systems (both regions attained only about 40% of the required benchmarks)...

The macroeconomic policy in Japan in the 1990s swung from fiscal expansion to fiscal consolidation and conversely. The efforts to restore soundness of public finance culminated in the Fiscal Structural Reform Act of 1997, which articulated several fiscal targets in the medium-term perspective. The act was however suspended after only a year due to economic slowdown, which threatened politicians with the possibility that fiscal consolidation might deteriorate the Japanese economy further. During the past decade, a number of economic packages to stimulate the return of the economy to a self-sustaining growth path totalled over 130 trillion yen in terms of project cost base.2 However, the Japanese economy has not recovered. As a result, these discretionary fiscal policies made the fiscal balance dramatically worse and accumulated government debt to over 140% of GDP in 2002. The new government under Prime Minister J. Koizumi was formed in April 2001. The government put structural reforms at the top of the agenda and included the fiscal consolidation plan to achieve a primary balance surplus in the early 2010s. While Japan is moving into an ageing society more rapidly than other countries, there is increasing pressure to restore public finances over the medium term. However, downside risk in the Japanese economy has been increasing since the middle of 2002 mainly due to serious deflationary pressure. Halting deflation is urgent in the short term for restoring economic growth. Japan is thus faced with considerable difficulties in achieving both the short-term objective of economic recovery and the medium-term objective of fiscal consolidation. In addition, Japan is in the extraordinary situation where there has been little incentive to enforce fiscal consolidation because huge domestic savings can finance huge government deficit, keeping the coupon rate of a ten-year Japanese Government bond to less than 1%...

The contemporary nation-state exists to perform – to provide financial assistance, public services and other benefits to its people. How well the government performs influences the economic and social well-being of citizens, the mindset that voters take into the election booth, the programmes and behaviour of politicians and bureaucrats, and the relationship between government and the governed. Delivering services and writing cheques are not the sole functions of the modern state, for it still has traditional watchman responsibilities such as defending the country against external threat and maintaining domestic health, safety and order. Although the old tasks are essential, in most nation-states they have been surpassed in the sentiments of citizens and in the fiscal accounts of government by a vastly broader array of public services than were provided generations ago. Government not only does more than it once did, it carries out many tasks differently. One of the themes of this paper is that a performing state is inherently a state in transition, adapting to changing conditions and opportunities. Performance is not a static measure, but one that requires ongoing feedback from situations and results to policies and action. Among the many transformations that the performing state has experienced is in its role as unifier of the people through symbols and actions that forge a common national identity. As the provision of services has gained prominence, diversity has gained ground over uniformity because citizens differ in the services they want or need. The performing state must serve the people, even if doing so requires that it serve them differently...

The budgetary process in the United States federal government is different from that in other OECD member countries. This is a consequence of the strict separation of powers that characterises the American constitutional system and of a long historical development in which new layers of institutional innovation were successively added to existing ones. The presidential budgetary process started to develop in the beginning of the previous century. Its first codification took place in the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921, which required that the President submit a budget for the government to Congress and created the Bureau of the Budget, now the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). In the 1970s, Congress changed its own budgetary process through the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974, which created the Congressional Budget Resolution and established the Congressional Budget Office. Another layer of innovation was added during the 1980s with the aim of controlling the deficit. This began with the Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act of 1985, commonly known as the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act, which in 1990 was fundamentally amended by the Budget Enforcement Act...

In recent years, considerable attention has been focused on the importance of managing information in organisations, as well as the challenges for organisations to make use of and adapt from it. Organisationsare expected to value information, to be able to learn from the past and to adapt to changing circumstances. While much of the literature has focused on  private sector organisations, public sector organisations and indeed thegovernments within which they operate are undergoing significant reforms and face equal challenges. This paper considers organisational learning in the public sector in light of current public sector reform initiatives, many of which have implicitly been based on the assumption that the public sector can indeed use empirical evidence on past experience to inform current decision-making. In doing so, the paper tries to avoid treating organisational learning anthromorphically, focusing instead on the processes and procedures that form the life blood of organisations. Learning in organisations relates to how the organisation deliberately changes and adapts over time in terms of structures, functions, values, attitudes and behaviour. Organisational learning, as we shall use the term, refers to formal structures of information and whether or not they are used. Our interest is in how organisations can bring together information on past performance and have it influence decisions. Building on organisational learning literature, we will argue that while individual learning is important, it is not enough. There is a need to institutionalise learning processes within a public sector organisation...

The United States has a substantial impact on promoting economic growth and reducing poverty in developing countries due to the large size of its economy, its ability to influence world opinion and action and its weight within the international donor community. In 2001 the United States was the largest donor in the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC) in volume terms, reporting net official development assistance (ODA) of USD 10.9 billion, more than one-fifth of the DAC total. This represented 0.11% of its gross national income (GNI), the lowest ODA/GNI ratio in the DAC and below the DAC average country effort of 0.40%. President Bush recently announced a bold new proposal, the “Millennium Challenge Account” (MCA) for an additional USD 5 billion annually by 2006. If approved by Congress, the MCA will consolidate the American position as the largest donor, and slightly improve the country’s ODA/GNI performance. The American “checks and balances” system of government has some important ramifications for United States development co-operation. This approach implicates a wide range of stakeholders in budget decision-making, especially through the Congress. Flexible approaches to compromise are standard features of the American system, especially for issues of a short-term nature that respond to national or special interests. Addressing long-term issues related to development co-operation can prove more difficult because they lack urgency or a sufficiently strong and influential domestic constituency. Several of the issues raised in the 1998 DAC Peer Review are being addressed by the current Administration. However, some important development issues, including those relating to Congress, to the basic structure of American aid administration, or to the promotion of policy coherence for development, have proven more resistant to change and are noted again in this review...