Publication: Mauritania - Public Expenditure Review : Update
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Date
2011-05
ISSN
Published
2011-05
Author(s)
World Bank
Abstract
Mauritania is a West African country
located on the western edge of the Sahara desert, with a
population of approximately 3 million people that is mostly
concentrated in the urban areas. The country is in part
desert (3/4 of the 1,030,700 square kilometers of the
territory). Since independence in the 1960s,
Mauritania's economy has been dependent on natural
resources, iron ore first then combined with fisheries, and
presently oil and other minerals. The severe droughts of the
1960s and 1970s, which generated migration from rural to
urban areas and created pressures on the country's
administration through increased demand for education,
housing, employment, health, administrative and other
services, which continue up to today. Mauritania's
eligibility to the multilateral debt relief initiative in
2006, the beginning of oil exports, the successive food,
financial and political-institutional crises, as well as the
mining sector boom, were the major factors in the changes in
economic aggregates over this period. Mauritania's
economic performance deteriorated sharply in 2008-09 on the
back of these domestic and external shocks. Real gross
development product (GDP) contracted from 5.9 percent in
2007 to -1.2 percent in 2009. The external positions
weakened from a deficit of 9 percent of GDP in 2007 to 12.3
percent of GDP in 2009, and international reserves only
covered about two months of imports. The government launched
the Special Intervention Programme (programme special
d'intervention - PSI) in 2008 to reduce the impact of
the food crisis on the population. The country faces several
key challenges in its recovery, including a narrow
productive base, vulnerability to external shocks, a weak
business climate, and persistent poverty levels in the rural
sector. While the government has an integrated reform agenda
on Public Finance Management (PFM), this report highlights a
number of bottlenecks that affect the planning and execution
of expenditures affecting development goals, and offers a
set of prioritized, sequenced measures that mitigate them.
Citation
“World Bank. 2011. Mauritania - Public Expenditure Review : Update; République Islamique de Mauritanie : Actualisation de la revue des dépenses publiques. Public expenditure review (PER);. © Washington, DC. http://openknowledge.worldbank.org/entities/publication/a56573a4-df0e-5c49-9c00-6cee91cda0e1 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”