The Public Expenditure Management toolkit is currently being developed by staff at the World Bank. The toolkit provides an approach for assessing public expenditure institutional (rules of the game) arrangements. It focuses on the three levels of expenditure outcome: aggregate fiscal discipline; strategic and intersectoral allocations; and operational efficiency and service delivery. It starts from an assessment of the problems that poor performance at these three levels might be generating:
- level 1 performance - Is fiscal policy sound and sustainable? Is it associated with predictable aggregate expenditure levels?
- level 2 performance - Is the budget a credible signal of a government's policy intentions?
Is there adequate oversight of the government's policy intentions?
- level 3 performance - Are the conditions in place for effective service delivery?
If the toolkit reveals performance problems at any of these levels, subsequent institutional assessments probe for where the weaknesses lie. Many of these weaknesses are associated with a lack of comprehensiveness, transparency, and predictability and poor links between policy, planning and the budget. The level 2 institutional assessment indicates where more detailed work might be undertaken to investigate the arrangements for supporting strategic political decision-making. The level 3 institutional assessment points out when further expenditure tracking work might be necessary to assess leakage.
The toolkit is under development and can be viewed by clicking on the link below. This site contains two versions of the toolkit. The first focuses on the key questions associated with the three levels. The second toolkit draws on the first one and takes the process of classifying, explaining, and linking the questions and associated values, a step further. As further work is done to finalize the product, updated versions will be posted on the website. If you would like to make comments/suggestions about the toolkit, please e-mail PublicExpenditure@worldbank.org.
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