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Initiative on Good Governance for Development (GfD) in the Arab Countries: Reform Themes
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This Framework for Policy Dialogue includes priority issues gleaned from international experience in order to serve as a guide for policy discussion.
Working Groups in Arab countries may find them useful; countries may change
or add their own priority issues.
See also the Results and Recommendations of this Panel's meeting during the Dead Sea Conference 6-7 February 2005.
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Theme 3: Governance of Public Finance
Governance of public finance is a core reform area that has a critical influence on promoting development in Arab countries. In this framework the budget, as one of the key economic instruments in allocating a significant share of a nation's gross domestic product, establishes policy priorities through the allocation of funding. The basic operations of government ministries and agencies are established in the context of the budget. Overall, the budget provides the architecture for decision-making and accountability in government. It is a key tool to promote market based economic growth and long term fiscal sustainability.
Challenges:
1. Improving transparency:
- How to deal with insufficient budget transparency and inclusiveness with regard to budget planning and execution, fragmentation of spending, including tax expenditures and foreign aid?
- How to deal with inaccurate asset inventories?
- How to manage public resources with incomplete and inaccurate for-casting and decision making systems?
- How to increase transparency with outsourcing schemes?
- How to improve the weak parliamentary control of the budget process?
2. Improving accountability:
- How to combat corruption with regard to budget resources?
- How to increase the system's capacity for self-supervision in order to create internal credibility of control and audit mechanisms?
3. Improving Performance and development relevance:
- How to link budgets to development plans and economic programming?
- How to introduce the notion of performance in budgeting processes?
more ….
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