Public sector expenditure consumes a sizable proportion of world GDP and affects the well-being of everyone impacted by public services. Being able to optimize the quality of public sector planning, budgeting and reporting (PBR), in addition to effectively measuring its impact is of major importance. Even a few percent improvement in public sector performance can mean increased well-being for vast numbers of people.
The detailed mechanisms of specific country’s public sector planning, budgeting and reporting systems tend to be entangled with the particular, sometimes idiosyncratic, political and legislative apparatus of the country in question. It therefore takes time to work out how the system within a particular country works, to strip out its idiosyncratic aspects and to distil the key features of the particular system. Identifying the key features of these systems is essential for making comparisions between countries when evaluating and comparing different systems in order to improve the way we do public sector PBR.
Coming to grips with the overview and details of a particular country’s system prior to using what is discovered to think about how to improve one’s own system can be a labor intensive exercise.