Performance budgeting is considered one of the essential elements of public financial management reform and has been adopted in many countries. However, it continues to present a significant challenge within the budget process. This case study draws from change management theories to tell the...

This paper provides a methodological tool to support the collection and preparation of standardized, comprehensive data regarding public spending on infrastructure services that can be rigorously compared across countries. Infrastructure is defined to cover six sectors: irrigation, energy...

As early as 2000, development partners embarked on a decade-long search for"innovative"or alternative sources of Official Development Assistance to help finance achievement of the Millennium Development Goals. For their part, developing countries have sought not only more financial flows but...

Land assets have become an important source of financing capital investments by subnational governments in developing countries. Land assets, often with billions of dollars per transaction, rival and sometimes surpass subnational borrowing or fiscal transfers for capital spending. While reducing...

Integration in the East African Community offers significant opportunities not only to expand trade among member states, but more importantly to scale up regional production to take advantage of much larger global market opportunities. Special economic zones are a potentially valuable instrument...

Indonesia has come a long way from centralized governance to decentralized local governance, and today Indonesia ranks among the most decentralized developing countries. The Government of Indonesia is revisiting all aspects of local governance to make appropriate legal and institutional...

Fiscal responsibility laws are institutions with which multiple governments in the same economy -- national and subnational --can commit to help avoid irresponsible fiscal behavior that could have short-term advantages to one of them but that would be collectively damaging. Coordination failures...

This paper proposes a novel method of isolating fluctuations in public spending that are likely to be uncorrelated with contemporaneous macroeconomic shocks and can be used to estimate government spending multipliers. The approach relies on two features unique to many low-income countries: (1)...

In response to the Great Recession of 2008, many national governments implemented fiscal stimuli packages in 2009 and 2010 to prevent further declines in aggregate demand and to jump start their economic recovery. Where subnational governments responded with fiscal contraction, as in the United...

The economic recession, the end of stimulus funding and central government cutbacks, rising social costs and aging, and the need for infrastructure upgrading for urbanization are putting enormous fiscal stress on cities. The financing capacity of municipalities is greatly affected because of the...