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Over the past decade, Mexico has undergone significant economic and political reform. This period has witnessed important improvements in the health of public finances. The government’s narrow measure of the budget deficit has been below 1% of GDP for the past five years (2003-08). Furthermore, the public sector borrowing requirement – the broader definition of budget deficit1 – has been below 3% of GDP for the same period. Although these improved fiscal balances have been aided by higher revenues as a result of significant increases in oil prices, Mexico’s recent public finances have clearly reflected an era of fiscal responsibility. This improved fiscal situation should place Mexico in a better position to withstand the current global economic crisis.

Between 2000 and 2005, the Mexican State of Coahuila implemented the social programme called Piso Firme. Its main objective was to replace mud floors with cement ones to improve the quality of life of vulnerable households living in marginal areas. Because the programme was so successful with 34 000 beneficiaries in Coahuila, it was extended to the national level to cover more than 300 000 households. Its success even generated the implementation of a national strategic goal: the eradication of dirt floors by the end of 2012.

The PMP is the tool created to comply with the obligation established by the 2007 reform (the Integral Fiscal Reform, IFR) to achieve 20% savings by the end of the current administration, at a rate of 5% per year. It is a programme for reducing administrative expenses and energy costs.

Oil prices have been rising significantly since 2002, reaching a high of USD 145 per barrel in July 2008.1 The huge flows of revenues present an excellent opportunity for large oil exporters, providing access to fresh capital inflows that could be allocated to savings, investment, or external debt cancellation. However, oil price volatility and inefficient management of oil revenues can also generate non-desired effects. Some of the symptoms of the so-called “Dutch disease” include overheating the economy, reducing incentives to improve the tax system, and increasing pressure for exchange rate appreciation or exchange rate volatility.

This chapter reviews the implementation and management of the Mexican budget. Financial management is in the midst of an ambitious agenda of reform with the overall goal of improving the quality of public service. The central concepts behind the reforms are to delegate management responsibility to programme managers and to focus greater attention on improving results. This chapter is divided into seven sections: the execution of the budget; cash management; public accounting; internal control and audit; human resource management; procurement; and the conclusion and recommendations.

Over the past decade, Mexico has made significant improvements in its fiscal performance by implementing important reforms to establish macroeconomic and financial stability, to open the economy to trade and investment, and to change the political environment. The prudent fiscal policies pursued by the Mexican government have resulted in strong fiscal performance. Albeit aided by higher oil prices, these policies have successfully lowered public sector debt and reduced the budget deficit to 3% of GDP or below for the past five years (2003-08).1 Economic growth has improved over the past decade, although the economy is not expanding rapidly enough to make living standards equivalent to richer OECD countries.

Strengthening local auditing: The technical capability and independence of state legislature audit organs is to be strengthened (head audit officers are to be appointed by a majority of two-thirds of legislators and for seven-year terms). State audit organs are also bound by principles of impartiality and legality (Mexican Constitution, Articles 116 and 122).

The 2006 Budget and Fiscal Responsibility Law required the establishment of rules to ensure that investment projects are properly evaluated. The Ministry of Finance (SHCP), through its Investment Unit, manages the public investment system which is an important element for achieving better results from investment projects undertaken by the public sector. Every year the Investment Unit publishes guidelines for the preparation and presentation of the cost-benefit analysis of programmes and investment projects (Lineamientos para la elaboración y presentación de los análisis costo y beneficio de los programas y proyectos de inversión).

We pursue a two-fold objective in this paper. First, we try to describe comprehensively the behaviour of sectoral growth cycles in Turkish manufacturing by using several statistical measures and to analyse the co-movement between them via correlation and peak-through analysis. One of the remarkable results of this study is the emergence of the "chemicals" and "paper and paper products"sectors as the leading sectors of total manufacturing. Another important result reveals that export-oriented sectors, which have a high correlation with total manufacturing and with each other, appear as the main drivers of total manufacturing. The second objective of this study is to investigate the response of output in Turkish manufacturing industries to monetary policy shocks within the vector autoregressive framework. The results show that all manufacturing sectors respond to a contractionary monetary policy shock with a reduction in absolute output but that the degree of output reduction is not the same in all sectors. The total manufacturing output declines very quickly after the shock, reaching its minimum value within three quarters.

This paper examines the effect of economic crises on structural unemployment using an Autoregressive Distributed Lags model and accounting for the role of institutional settings. Analysing an unbalanced panel of 30 OECD economies from 1970 to 2008, we found that downturns have, on average, a significant positive impact on the level of structural unemployment rate. The maximum impact varies with the severity of the downturn. Institutions (such as Employment Protection Legislation, average replacement ratio and product market regulation) influence both the extent of the initial shock and the adjustment pattern in the aftermath of a downturn.
Despite progress over the past two decades Mexico?s health and education indicators remain well below the average of the OECD and some of its Latin American emerging market peers. Health insurance coverage is incomplete, especially for low-income families, and access to health services is highly uneven. There are several separate vertically integrated insurance networks, which increases administrative costs and results in an inefficient use of facilities. In education, lower secondary schools enroll only two thirds of the relevant age group and the quality of education is low, as indicated by poor PISA scores. This reflects poor teaching quality, a consequence of non-transparent teacher selection processes until recently, and limited school autonomy in budgeting, instruction and personnel decisions. Accountability to the government and parents is also low as there is no national exit exam after secondary education and the existing evaluation schemes are fragmented. Recent health and education reforms have started to address these issues, but more needs to be done to increase the efficiency of spending by increasing the coverage of health insurance, reducing the fragmentation of the health system, increasing enrolment in lower secondary education, and improving the quality of teaching.
In the decade following the 1998 financial crisis Russia’s banking system grew much larger and stronger – indeed, growth rates were dangerously high – but even before the onset of the current global crisis it continued to play a limited role in intermediating savings and investment, especially for small and medium-sized enterprises. Moreover, despite important improvements, some weaknesses in prudential supervision remained, and the Russian banking sector continued to have too many very small banks doing little if any banking business. This paper discusses the policy imperatives in the short term, in the face of the ongoing economic crisis, and reforms that could be implemented over the longer term to improve the efficiency and resilience of the financial system and raise Russia’s potential growth rate. While the current crisis is painful for the banking sector as well as the broader economy, it may facilitate a restructuring of the system that will be positive in the long run, as well as new approaches to regulation that will make banking less crisis-prone.
This study analyses trade flows in intermediate goods and services among OECD countries and with their main trading partners. Combining trade data and input-output tables, bilateral trade in intermediate goods and services is estimated according to the industry of origin and the using industry for the period 1995-2005. Trade in intermediate inputs takes place mostly among developed countries and represents respectively 56% and 73% of overall trade flows in goods and services. Gravity regressions indicate that in comparison to trade in final goods and services, imports of intermediates are more sensitive to trade costs and are less attracted by bilateral market size. Further findings are that the activities of multinational enterprises can be associated with higher trade flows of intermediate inputs and with a higher ratio of foreign to domestic inputs in using industries. Results from production function regressions and from a stochastic frontier analysis suggest that a higher share of imported inputs leads to productivity gains in domestic industries and reduces inefficiencies in the use of technology.
While Mexico’s growth performance has gradually improved over the past decades, its convergence toward OECD countries has been less rapid than in several other emerging markets. The recent significant reductions in import tariffs should help the economy take fuller advantage of trade and investment integration, which could be a relative strength for Mexico given its geographic location. Reforms introduced in the past two years, including those to promote competition and transparency in the financial sector and, to a lesser extent in telecommunications, will also stimulate the dynamism of the economy. Despite this progress, further reforms are needed to boost overall and within-sector productivity. Relative weaknesses in education, infrastructure, financial development, the rule of law, as well as a lack of competition come out in various studies as explaining why Mexico has not grown as fast as other countries. Focusing attention now on reforms in areas with rapid pay-offs such as improving competitiveness and infrastructure could yield double benefits in supporting the recovery from the current recession and longer-term growth. This can be achieved by increasing competition, especially in network industries, liberalizing further the foreign investment and trade regimes, and improving education coverage and trade-related infrastructure.

La présente étude sur le système budgétaire slovène fait partie intégrante du Projet sur le budget du Groupe de travail des Hauts responsables du budget. Le projet sur le budget vise à mettre en place et renforcer des réseaux régionaux de hauts responsables du budget en dehors de la zone de l’OCDE. Cette étude a servi de base à l’examen du système budgétaire slovène lors de la première réunion du réseau des hauts responsables du budget d’Europe centrale et orientale, les 10 et 11 novembre 2004 à La Haye.

English

La présente étude sur le système budgétaire roumaine fait partie intégrante du Projet sur le budget du Groupe de travail des Hauts responsables du budget. Le projet sur le budget vise à mettre en place et renforcer des réseaux régionaux de hauts responsables du budget en dehors de la zone de l’OCDE. Cette étude a servi de base à l’examen du système budgétaire roumaine lors de la première réunion du réseau des hauts responsables du budget d’Europe centrale et orientale, les 10 et 11 novembre 2004 à La Haye.

English

Mesdames et Messieurs, c’est pour moi un grand plaisir de pouvoir formuler quelques observations liminaires sur cette conférence.

La politique budgétaire est un thème récurrent dans ma carrière. En 1975, j’ai commencé celle-ci au ministère des Finances, à la Direction du budget. Plus tard, en qualité de directeur du Centraal Planbureau (CPB, Bureau d’analyse de la politique économique des Pays-Bas), j’ai participé à la préparation d’importantes réformes de notre régime budgétaire. Et aujourd’hui, comme Ministre des Finances, je suis plus que jamais convaincu de l’importance d’une politique budgétaire nationale adaptée. Cela ne tient pas (seulement, devrais-je dire) à ce que j’aime les chiffres, mais aussi à ce que les chiffres ont des conséquences directes et graves pour les conditions de vie des citoyens. Sans politique budgétaire rationnelle, pas de système viable de protection sociale, pas de financement pour une politique adaptée d’éducation et pas d’assise pour une croissance économique durable. Je pense donc que l’effort de réforme et de modernisation de l’appareil budgétaire national est l’une des meilleures orientations que puisse suivre un gouvernement soucieux des impératifs sociaux.

English

Cet article a pour but de mettre en évidence quelques-unes des particularités des institutions et des politiques du secteur public néerlandais qui peuvent être qualifiées « d’exception néerlandaise » et qui, en outre, peuvent paraître mériter une étude approfondie, voire s’affirmer comme source d’inspiration dans les pays qui réfléchissent aujourd’hui sur la modernisation de leur secteur public. Ce dessein comporte deux limitations qui doivent être soulignées dès le départ.

English
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