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This article examines the PART initiative of the United States Office of Management and Budget from a practical standpoint: how federal agencies have dealt with the requirements of PART and what strategies they have employed to be successful. The article highlights four challenges that confront both agencies and OMB as they work to complete assessments of all 1 000 programmes and describes approaches that agencies are taking to meet these challenges.

The state of Paraná in Brazil has turned to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a guiding framework for its territorial development policy since 2016. Building on the recommendations from the OECD report on “A Territorial Approach to the SDGs in Paraná, Brazil” (2021), the state has continued to leverage the SDGs as a vehicle to address territorial disparities and challenges in a number of policy domains, including agriculture, health, education, economic growth, environmental conservation and public safety. This report assesses the state’s progress on the 2021 OECD recommendations and offers renewed guidance on how to harness the SDGs to tackle the state’s main challenges, including designing a state-wide Sustainable Development Plan and integrating the SDGs in its new 2053 Strategic Vision.

This article uses bureaumetric methods and five years of data on the UK civil service to test several key claims about shared service implementation on a larger scale. It begins by examining organisational dualisms and the promises and challenges of shared services. It then describes the United Kingdom’s case, and develops the bureaumetric method for assessing reform progress. Finally, it presents the findings from the study and discusses implications for research and practice.

The 2001 DAC Recommendation on Untying Official Development Assistance to the Least Developed Countries entered into force on 1 January 2002. Earlier HLM progress reports concluded that implementation was proceeding well, although some areas were identified that required additional efforts or work to be completed...

This Paper analyses and presents the implementation of new procurement tools relating to the choice of participants in public procurement procedures in selected EU member countries, based on the EU Directives, in order to provide examples to SIGMA’s partner countries. A detailed analysis of policies and rules, as well as practical examples, offers guidance on issues such as how to reduce over bureaucratic requirements and the cost of participation for economic operators; how contracting authorities can simplify and streamline the process of verification of information provided by economic operators; how other state authorities (tax offices, courts, etc.) can support contracting authorities; to establish official lists of economic operators; and how to use blacklists and under what conditions. The study gives a detailed overview of the provisions of the EU Directives on mandatory and discretionary grounds for exclusion, self-cleaning, selection of economic operators, self-certification, means of proof, official lists and blacklisting. It presents several practical examples of the transposition of those provisions into the national legislation of selected EU member countries.

The global financial crisis and the policy response to it have placed a sharp spotlight on the issue of implicit guarantees for bank debt. This report discusses the incidence of implicit government guarantees for bank debt, their determinants, and estimates of their value. It shows i) that the extent of implicit guarantees differs from one banking sector to another and, within a given banking sector, from one bank to another, ii) that implicit guarantees are higher the lower the bank’s stand-alone creditworthiness, the higher the creditworthiness of its sovereign and the relatively bigger the bank in its domestic context, iii) that the incidence of implicit guarantees increased since the beginning of the financial crisis, but has decreased more recently, iv) that this recent decrease can be explained to a large extent by declining sovereign strength and hence a reduced capacity of on the part of many sovereigns to provide for such guarantees, but is also consistent with ongoing efforts in many OECD countries to make bank failure resolution regimes and practices more effective, and v) that implicit guarantees persist. Implicit guarantees imply an undesirably close link between the value of bank and sovereign debt. They also imply significant funding cost advantages for the banks that benefit from them, thus implying competitive distortions and an invitation to beneficiary banks to use them and, perhaps, take on too much risk.