Client reports

This paper is about the nature of the budget process in a highly aid-dependent developing country with weak institutions. It argues that, while external aid helped to rebuild Mozambique after a long and devastating civil war and has contributed to economic growth, it has also had perverse side-effects, fragmenting government planning, budgeting and management and weakening national ownership of policymaking. Since Mozambique also has a weak civil society and a weak parliament that is not yet able to act as an effective check on the executive, high aid dependence means that the budget process essentially involves only two actors, the executive and foreign donors. Accountability to donors is much stronger than it is to Mozambican society.