Other Public Sector Study
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Publication
The World Bank's Support for Subnational Governance in Large Federal Countries: Lessons Learned from Argentina, Brazil and Nigeria
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022)Limited local tax revenue and low public sector efficiency are two critical problems of public sector management and key constraints for the economic and social development of many subnational governments in large federal countries. To create fiscal space without compromising macroeconomic stability and fiscal sustainability, there is a need for reforms that lead to better use of public resources and improved expenditure efficiency through reforms in budgeting, procurement, and tax administration. This note presents lessons learned from the World Bank’s subnational governance projects in three large federal countries - Argentina, Brazil and Nigeria - between 2008-2017. These lessons learned can be useful in shaping the design of future subnational governance projects in other federal countries, particularly those projects seeking to improve service delivery, public expenditure systems and core governance institutions. -
Publication
Using New Data to Support Tax Treaty Negotiation
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-07-12)This paper introduces the new Tax Treaties Explorer dataset, developed with support from the World Bank and the G-24, and illustrates its use for research by tax treaty negotiators, policy makers, and researchers. The new dataset provides a rich source of data to reexamine existing tax treaty policy, inform negotiation positions, and assess treaty networks. For the first time, it provides a tool to analyze trends in the content of tax treaties, across individual agreements, over time, and between countries. To illustrate the value of such an approach, we replicate a study by Barthel, Busse, and Neumayer (2009), which found a positive association between the presence of a tax treaty and the bilateral stock of FDI. We show that this effect is mainly driven by the withholding tax rates in the treaty rather than by other provisions affecting taxing rights such as permanent establishment. If the outcomes of this proof-of-concept replication are borne out in future research, this would suggest that negotiators can seek the maximum protection of source taxing rights in other parts of the treaty, knowing that this is unlikely to dilute investment-promoting impacts. -
Publication
Chatbots for Third-Party Monitoring: CivicTech Pilot in Madagascar
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-06)Growing evidence confirms that citizen engagement is key to improving the delivery and quality of public services, management of public finances, and to promoting social inclusion, resulting in tangible improvements in people’s lives. The advent and availability of new technologies provide new opportunities to reach citizens, aggregate their ‘voice’ and demand, help governments respond, and partner with citizens to find and implement solutions collectively. With the right approach, CivicTech enables citizens to overcome income, social, and geographical barriers to interact with governments and participate at the local or national level. The CivicTech pilot in Madagascar supported the development of a Facebook ChatBot (bot) to enable third-party monitoring of service delivery operations for the Madagascar Public Sector Performance Project (PAPSP, P150116). A similar approach could be replicated for Community Driven Development (CDD) projects and local government and decentralized service delivery projects to achieve a multi-channel structure for third-party monitoring (offline, mobile, and web). The note documents the CivicTech pilot experience in Madagascar and lessons learned. -
Publication
Citizen Engagement in Operations: A Stock-Take of Citizen Engagement in Development Policy Financing
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-06)Guided by the 2014 Strategic Framework for Mainstreaming Citizen Engagement in World Bank Group Operations, the World Bank supports policies, programs, projects, and advisory services and analytics where citizen engagement (CE) can improve development results. While the corporate commitment to mainstream CE targets investment operations, the World Bank teams continue to explore CE in other instruments. Engaging Citizens for Better Development Results, a report by the Independent Evaluation Group (IEG), assessed the Bank Group’s efforts to mainstream CE. It recommends the World Bank “encourage and support efforts of its regional, country, and Global Practices teams to establish, where appropriate, thick CE that is regular and continuous, uses multiple tools, and is embedded in country systems.” It also suggests this objective could be achieved by more systematically using existing channels of dialogue and stakeholder engagement, including that of Development Policy Financing (DPF), and applying tools at the various levels. Given this context, this Governance Note aims to take stock of existing CE practice in DPF by shedding light on the prior action usage. -
Publication
Mainstreaming Citizen Engagement through the World Bank Group’s Country Engagement Model
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-12-01)Efforts to mainstream citizen engagement into the Country Partnership Framework (CPF) cycle have the potential to contribute toward achieving country development goals and the World Bank Group’s twin goals of ending extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity by maximizing the impact of citizen-centric initiatives. Informed by the findings of a desk review of the Systematic Country Diagnostic (SCD) and corresponding CPF from FY14 to FY19, this technical note is intended to serve as a resource for World Bank task teams to elaborate on options and entry points for systematic mainstreaming of citizen engagement in the CPF cycle, specifically in preparing the SCDs, CPFs, Performance and Learning Reviews, and Completion and Learning Reviews. -
Publication
Improving Public Sector Performance: Through Innovation and Inter-Agency Coordination
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-10)This report is an inaugural issue in a new series that aims to offer a fresh look at how developing countries are overcoming persistent problems in public sector management. Significant improvements in public sector performance are being evidenced across the developing world today, as government officials and political leaders find new and innovative ways to tackle long-standing challenges. Part I of this report demonstrates that public sector performance is being pursued diligently and successfully across a variety of country contexts, including in low-income environments. Through surveying its governance specialists from around the globe, the World Bank has assembled a collection of 15 cases that showcase how lessons from global experience are being adapted and applied in practice. The report also explores common success drivers that appear in each of the cases. Part II focuses on a special, cross-cutting topic that is critical to public sector performance -- policy and inter-agency coordination. As the responsibilities of government have grown in volume and complexity, policy and program coordination has become ever more challenging, and the stakes have never been higher. Enhancing coordination will depend not only on the adopted formal institutional mechanisms, but also on their interplay with the broader institutional environment and with other processes that influence coordination. -
Publication
Re-Mapping Opportunity: Making Best Use of the Economic Potential of Russia's Regions
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-03-01)In order to understand a country as large and diverse as Russia, it is extremely important to consider spatial patterns of economic development. As Russia looks for new drivers of economic growth, it is important to understand the structural conditions that have defined economic development in Russia’s regions. This report uses the Economic Potential Index (EPI) methodology to identify the conditions that drive regional development. Economic potential is the level of productivity that is possible for a region to achieve given its structural endowments, which are characteristics that are hard to alter in the short run. The methodology used in this report combines quantitative analysis of drivers of productivity across regions with in-depth case studies that focus on the role of regional governments and institutions in converting endowments into economic outcomes. This methodology generates insights that are relevant for both national and regional governments. The first chapter of this report provides an overview of regional development in Russia over the last 25 years and identifies “Russia-specific” national structural conditions that may affect regional development. The second chapter discusses the results of an assessment of economic potential at the regional level and the factors that shape it in Russia. The third chapter focuses on the role of national and regional governance, policy, and institutions in promoting economic development of the regions. The final chapter proposes policy priorities for both regional and national authorities. -
Publication
Peru: Building a More Efficient and Equitable Fiscal Decentralization System
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2017-05-02)Over the past two decades, Peru has achieved remarkable economic success. Average annual Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth has exceeded 5 percent since 2001. Poverty has been consistently reduced, and sustained improvements have been observed in social and human development. The poverty incidence rate fell from 58 to 23 percent between 2004 and 2014, and households’ incomes at the bottom 40 percent grew 50 percent faster than the national average. The structural transformation of Peru’s economy striking fast and widely shared growth transformed Peru into an upper-middle income and diversified economy. This report analyzes recent trends of the fiscal decentralization process in Peru and presents a set of reform options designed to harvest the envisaged efficiency and equity gains in service delivery that the fiscal decentralization was expected to bring. The analysis and policy options are presented in a conceptually logical order: (i) departing from institutional arrangements in the vertical structure of subnational governments passing to (ii) the need of a clearer definition of spending responsibilities among levels of government that needs to be followed by (iii) a commensurate redefinition of revenue assignments and (iv) enhancing equalization role of the transfer system. -
Publication
Integrated Thinking and Reporting: Focusing on Value Creation in the Public Sector
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-06-28)This introductory guide has been developed by the International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC), the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (CIPFA) with the support of the World Bank to explain to public sector leaders and their teams how integrated thinking and reporting can help the sector consider how make the most of resources, encourage the right behaviors and demonstrate to stakeholders how they are achieving the strategy and creating value over the short and longer term. -
Publication
Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia: Evaluation of MDGs Specific Purpose Grant to Regions
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-03-29)Ethiopia is a highly decentralized country. Presently, sub-national government taxes and revenues account for about 28 percent of general taxes and revenues, and sub-national expenditures amount to 51 percent of general government expenditures. The ensuing vertical mismatch is bridged by grants from the Federal government to the regions. Presently, these grants account for 57 percent of sub-national expenditures1. For many years, these grants consisted mostly of a block grant (the Federal General Purpose Grant) given without any strings attached, which means the regions could use it as they wished. The rest of the report is organized as follows. Section two provides the policy context that is the information, data, evolutions, etc. specific to Ethiopia, which are necessary to understand and interpret the MDGs grant policy. Section three present and discusses the policy content that is the components of the policy previously identified. Section four is a policy assessment, which utilizes the evaluation framework proposed above to analyze the relationships between the various components of the policy, and discuss its efficiency, its effectiveness and its success. Section five is a conclusion that summarizes the analysis, and attempts, prudently and modestly, to outline some potential avenues for future action.