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Improving the Quality of Public Expenditure in the Dominican RepublicThis book addresses the achievements,
 challenges, and opportunities to improve the quality of
 public spending. Steps to make such changes have come
 through monitoring and evaluation approaches that can be
 replicated or expanded; sectoral efforts to improve the
 performance of priority programs; Congress's use of
 information on the results of public spending; the
 implementation of performance budgeting at subnational
 levels; and the harmonization of accounting between the
 three levels of the federal government. All these aspects
 are key elements of comprehensive reform. Currently, as the
 book states, accountability focuses on achieving results
 rather than on centering attention on mere compliance with
 rules and procedures. In this context, based on a new legal
 framework, the government of Mexico has decisively promoted
 results-based management and budgeting. The Performance
 Evaluation System (SED) was finally established in 2008 with
 the institution of the principles, concepts, methodologies,
 guidelines, procedures, and systems that support its
 operation. Its adoption as a common practice in the Federal
 Public Administration (APF) process will require a gradual,
 progressive, systematic learning and continuous improvement
 that should allow performance evaluation to take root in the
 APF. This calls for consolidating the Results-Based
 Budgeting (RBB)-SED in all agencies, expanding its use and
 improving the quality of the information that feeds it.
 However, not just the APF benefit will from the
 implementation of the RBB-SED. As the publication suggests,
 the approach to an expenditure budget based on performance
 information offers Congress great opportunities to enhance
 its regulatory and supervisory functions. The improvement in
 the quality of Matrices de Indicadores para Resultados
 (MIRs), program evaluations, and their integration into the
 budgetary programming cycle also contributes to this purpose.
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Lebanon : Public Expenditure Review, Reform Priorities for Fiscal Adjustment, Growth and Poverty AlleviationLebanon's current priority -- in the face of high public deficits and unsustainable debt dynamics -- is to contain and rationalize public expenditures in every possible sector while improving the efficiency of social spending. The needed containment of primary public expenditures should be understood as a transition to restore fiscal sustainability and enhance growth prospects. This Public Expenditure Review aims to assist Lebanon in its fiscal stabilization effort. The containment of public expenditures could entail painful choices, which will first require an analysis to identify where spending pressures lie (e.g., contingent liabilities, social sectors), and how to address them. And ideally, eliminating non productive spending should replace containment as the main instrument of adjustment. The report seeks to identify what critical and realistic short and longer term measures can be implemented to achieve this objective. The report is organized as follows. Chapter 1 provides the macro-economic framework and discusses the need for fiscal adjustment. Chapter 2 looks for possibilities to contain primary expenditures in the next five years. Chapter 3 reviews the efficiency for current social expenditures, and explores ways to improve their efficiency with the view to improving support for human development during the ordinary course o f the economy and preventing human capital deterioration during any possible economic crisis. Finally, Chapter 4 discusses options to improve civil service and move towards performance budgeting in the medium-to-long run.
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Making Public Sector Reforms Work : Political and Economic Contexts, Incentives, and StrategiesSupporting effective public sector reform is a major challenge that the World Bank and other agencies and stakeholders have been grappling with. It is increasingly recognized that political economy factors play a crucial role. However, beyond this broad proposition, specific questions arise: What country contexts are more/less propitious for public sector reforms and what reforms are likely to succeed where? And can more explicitly taking political economy challenges into account help to pursue public sector reforms even in less propitious contexts? This paper addresses these issues in two ways: first, it draws on the existing literature to identify key propositions about factors that can trigger or facilitate public sector reforms, and those that tend to work against (successful) reforms. Second, it investigates the experience of World Bank public sector operations over the decade 2000-2010. It finds that governments in many developing countries face incentives to initiate public sector reforms, but that at the implementation stage, political costs frequently outweigh potential gains; and hence reforms are abandoned or left to wither. Real breakthroughs have been achieved in countries experiencing major structural shifts and those having political leadership committed to higher-level goals. The review of operations shows that successful projects are significantly more widespread than the literature would lead to assume. Furthermore, it provides tentative evidence that investing in understanding political economy drivers has been associated with better project performance. Key implications are the need to differentiate between country contexts more clearly ex ante, concentrate more on reform implementation during windows of opportunity that are typically of limited duration, and design reforms with a clear plan of engagement with stakeholder incentives.