The Great Recession has been an unplanned but critical stress test of contemporary fiscal policy and financial management. This article seeks to draw lessons from this crisis, whose final chapters have yet to be written. The lessons fall into two ...

As Portugal is facing strong fiscal pressure, government spending on public-private partnerships (PPPs) in the road sector has become a main budgetary constraint. In this article, we show how the financial crisis has created a unique arbitrage ...

The increased vulnerability of government finances in many countries underlines the importance of public risk management. We apply a specific risk management tool – stress testing – to public finances. After presenting a general framework for stress ...

This article assesses the experience of the Netherlands with performance budgeting since full programme and performance budgeting was introduced in 1999-2002. The lessons learned so far resulted in 2012 in a reform called “Accountable Budgeting ...

This article analyses the Dutch policy evaluation system from a budgetary perspective. It addresses the context and scope of the evaluation system, explains the need for such a system from the perspective of budget decision makers, describes the ...

This article shows how to combine top-down budgeting – in the core sense of the establishment of a hard aggregate expenditure ceiling at the start of the budget preparation process – with flexibility in the allocation of the aggregate ceiling ...

The Chilean government is exploring several important areas of public sector reform. This article discusses performance budgeting (including spending reviews, efficiency reviews, and the Chilean performance management system), mediumterm budgeting ...