• Budget process reforms and MTEFs
• Monitoring and Evaluation
• Public Expenditure Reviews
• Public Finance Diagnostics
• Public Service Reform, Capacity Building, Training
• Qualitative Research
• Quantitative surveys
• Statistical and econometric analysis

Public Expenditure Reviews

Public expenditure reviews (PERs) analyse the allocation and management of public expenditure.They may cover all government expenditure or focus on a few priority sectors (e.g. health, basic education, agriculture, water, roads).They can be used to inform strategic planning and budget preparation and to identify ways in which to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of resource allocations.Increasingly, PERs also review expenditure management systems and institutions, in recognition of the fact that it is the institutional framework, organisational capacity, and everyday expenditure management practice of government which determines the allocation and management of public expenditures.

A PER should be both backward-looking and forward-looking.It should analyse past performance in terms of resource allocation and service delivery in order to be able to make a realistic assessment of what the sector should be aiming to achieve in the medium term, in broad terms as follows:

• Fiscal Discipline – did expenditure correspond to budget allocations?
• Strategic Prioritisation – did expenditure correspond to strategic objectives? 
• Operational Efficiency – did expenditure deliver value for money (output indicators) or could other providers have delivered the same output more cheaply?Did publicly financed activities make a difference (outcome indicators)?

Analysis of future performance will involve the following lines of enquiry:

• Fiscal Discipline – what can we afford to do?What can we not afford to do (and why)?
• Strategic Prioritisation – How can we make expenditure conform more closely with strategic objectives?What changes in resource allocation will make the greatest difference?
• Operational Efficiency – How can we improve value for money? Can some services be financed privately without efficiency or effectiveness loss?

PERs typically involve collating and analysing secondary information.  This can be a large task and it will not be possible to look thoroughly at every monitoring and evaluation report for every project, programme, technical department, regional office and budget line across the sector. A decision has to be taken early on which areas should be left out and which should be the main focus of attention.  Generally, the focus is on those programmes that are most important in terms of overall expenditure and those which are of most immediate relevance to policy objectives. 

Other things to think about:

• Domestically financed public expenditure needs to be treated strategically.  PERs should therefore take into account the activities of other actors in the sector (i.e. the private sector, NGOs, CBOs)
• Capital expenditure needs to limited by the ability to meet recurrent costs, but often it is not, leading to unsustainable situations (e.g. schools without teachers).
• Wage and non-wage recurrent costs need to be kept in balance (at the extreme, imbalance implies teachers but no books, etc.)
• Decentralisation implies that regional and district levels have roles in the design and delivery of public programmes
• Increased private activity and contracting out implies different, possibly more demanding, public functions (information, regulation, contract management).

Some examples of PERs undertaken by OPM are provided below:

Project Examples