Publication: Zanzibar Public Expenditure Review 2003 : Laying the Foundations for Improved Public Expenditure Management
Loading...
Date
2003-06
ISSN
Published
2003-06
Author(s)
Editor(s)
Abstract
Zanzibar finds itself currently in an extremely precarious fiscal situation, caused by the dramatic decline in government revenue during the past four years. The decline is primarily the result of the harmonization of tax policy, and administration between Tanzania Mainland and Zanzibar, and as such, is likely to be permanent. Increasing revenue will require significant improvements in tax policy and administration, and is likely to be a slow process. In the short to medium term, the key challenge for Zanzibar is to adjust budgets, and the level and structure of public expenditures, to the new reality of a considerably smaller resource envelope. To date, the burden of adjustment has fallen exclusively on development, and non-wage expenditures, which have been cut in line with the fall in resources. This has led to a severe structural imbalance in Zanzibar's public expenditures, with expenditures on wages and salaries claiming 62 percent of recurrent expenditures. This structural imbalance between wage and non-wage expenditures, has direct implications for Government's capacity to deliver services, as staff often lack the means to carry out their functions. In addition to fiscal and public expenditure issues, this public expenditure review also assesses the role of the wider public sector in the Zanzibar economy. Here the most urgent need for reform concerns the role of the Zanzibar State Trading Corporation, which currently enjoys a monopoly on the export of cloves, Zanzibar's main agricultural product. Removing the monopoly and liberalizing the clove sector, is likely to have significant positive welfare implications for clove farmers and the Zanzibar economy. Main reasons for the high variability of revenue, include the fact that Zanzibar collects most of its revenue from indirect taxes, which reflect instability in the performance of imports, and production of cloves. Possible options to reduce this variability include (i) diversification of the tax system to reduce dependence on taxation of trade, and, (ii) reform of the indirect tax regime to have more predictable rates, and a standard valuation of imports.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“World Bank. 2003. Zanzibar Public Expenditure Review 2003 : Laying the Foundations for Improved Public Expenditure Management. Public expenditure review (PER);. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/14675 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
Associated URLs
Associated content
Other publications in this report series
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue
Collections
Related items
Showing items related by metadata.
Publication United Republic of Tanzania - Public Expenditure Review FY02 : Report on Fiscal Developments and Public Expenditure Management Issues(Washington, DC, 2002-05)This Public Expenditure Review (PER) examines the overall fiscal discipline, which after targeting, and achieving recurrent surpluses by FY99, the targets for FY01 were set to provide scope for financing of priority sector activities under the Poverty Reduction Strategy, and accommodate increased foreign inflows in the form of program grants. However, recurrent deficits in FY01, and, the target for FY02, delivered a recurrent deficit of 2.5 percent of GDP. Nonetheless, these deficits are within the sustainability thresholds indicated by recent analyses of fiscal, and debt sustainability, and remain compatible with continued macroeconomic stability. The report also looks at the introduction of cash flow planning, and the innovation introduced with the public finance act, to then analyze the government resources, and expenditures, which overall, expenditures on the key priority areas increased, exceeding the additional debt relief available through the enhanced Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative. The report subsequently focuses on two main sources of fiscal risks, namely, on public enterprise debts and retrenchment costs associated with privatization; and, on extra-budgetary commitments related to procurement. Containment of fiscal risks, and further work should be extended to quantify, and validate parastatal debts covering other resources of fiscal risks, including commitments to privatization. Recommendations include a review of the existing tracking systems to identify information gaps, and recommend how systems can be streamlined, how information flows can be improved, and to clarify roles, and responsibilities of key institutions in this process. Moreover, attention should be paid to both financial reporting, and service delivery, including ways of integrating the two, in addition to identifying links to the poverty monitoring process.Publication Kosovo, FR Yugoslavia : Medium-Term Public Expenditure Priorities(Washington, DC, 2002-10-16)Given the tight overall resource constraints in Kosovo, and in the face of declining donor support and limited access to external finance, difficult choices and trade-offs on spending decisions will need to be made. The main challenge will be to develop expenditure policies which will preserve macro-stability and ensure that public services are sustainable, comprehensive, and efficiently provided. Public spending policies need to lay the basis for broad-based equitable economic growth, and target the most needy, in an effective and efficient fashion. Through introducing the Medium Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF) approach in 2002, the United Nations Interim Administration in Kosovo (UNMIK) and the Provisional Institutions of Self Government (PISG) have started to make progress in adding a medium-term context to budget policy. This report identifies the several important expediture measures that require action. First, spending has to be reallocated across sectors, so reduce subsidies, reassess public sector employment, and provide finance for investment needs. Second, improve the efficiency of existing spending in the health, education, and social protection sectors. Third, increase the budget spending on health to provide a greater range of services and target educational finance to reduce inequality. Fourth, strengthen the effectiveness of the budget as a policy tool. Fifth, further improve transparency and accountability.Publication Uganda - Agriculture Public Expenditure Review(World Bank, 2010-02-28)This Agriculture Public Expenditure Review (AgPER) comprehensively reviews public expenditures on agriculture in Uganda and analyzes their efficiency and effectiveness. Its genesis lies in Agriculture Sector Working Group (A-SWG) discussions, especially during the budget process, which raised concerns about the seemingly low budget allocations to the sector and the failure to align limited resources with recognized priorities in the sector. To address these concerns, the A-SWG resolved to undertake this AgPER. Aside from providing a better understanding of the nature and composition of agricultural pubic expenditures in Uganda, the review will specifically analyze their efficiency and effectiveness with a view to identifying the types of expenditures that will promote pro-poor growth. The report is structured as follows. Section two analyzes trends in nominal and real sector budgets. It highlights the current and projected importance of agricultural sector expenditure in the national budget and gross domestic product (GDP). An analysis of agricultural price distortions indicates the extent to which the sector benefits from supportive policies. Section three describes budget planning and implementation at the national and local level and presents policy recommendations to improve those processes. Section four focuses on the technical efficiency of public spending. By tracking resource flows and analyzing the unit costs of goods and service delivery. Section four sheds light on whether public resources are used efficiently and which actions could improve efficiency. The concluding section summarizes the major findings and policy recommendations.Publication Tanzania - Public Expenditure Review (Vol. 2 of 2) : Consolidating the Medium Term Expenditure Framework(Washington, DC, 2001-01)This Public Expenditure Review (PER) for FY00, provided support to the Government of Tanzania in the preparation of its budget, and Medium Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF), and performed as well an external evaluation of the country's budget performance. The report contains two volumes, the Main Report (v. I) first describes the main features of the PER process, to then present the main findings emerging from a review of fiscal performance, and public expenditure management in Tanzania. A discussion of systemic fiscal issues, critical to enhancing the effectiveness of public expenditure follows, to reach a series of updated sectoral expenditure reviews, prioritizing on education, health, water, agriculture, works, land and justice. Volume II, presents the Government's MTEF for FY-01/03, in which the macroeconomic context is described, providing a cross sectoral MTEF within the priority sectors. In addition, a detailed discussion of the public sector reform program is presented, including discussions on the HIV/AIDS epidemic, identified as a key challenge to development efforts, requiring a multi-sectoral approach to contain its spread. Despite progress in consolidating the budget process, and macroeconomic policy, the transitional status of the country's economy, makes macroeconomic management particularly difficult. The report suggests rethinking the MTEF's contingency plans, within a flexible framework to further improve the linkages between prioritization, and the budgetary process.Publication Afghanistan : Building an Effective State, Priorities for Public Administration Reform(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2008-01-23)This report looks at the implications for public administration reform over the next 5-10 years, and proposes a priority agenda for action by the Government of Afghanistan (GOA) and the donor community. The report reviews the prospects and priorities for public administration reform in three key areas: building an effective civil service, improving local governance and service delivery, and making government accountable to the people. This report has made the case that public administration reform in Afghanistan is both very important and very difficult: very important because it will provide the Government o f Afghanistan with the capacity to respond to popular demands for good governance and improved service delivery; very difficult, because of the inherent challenges o f institutional change, especially in the current political and security situation in Afghanistan. Public Administration Reform (PAR) is a long-term task -This will require persistent effort over time, as well as innovative approaches to improve service delivery in the short and medium terms. Afghanistan's experience over the past five years, as well as lessons from other fragile states, provide some clues about how to go about public administration reform.
Users also downloaded
Showing related downloaded files
Publication World Development Report 2009(World Bank, 2009)Places do well when they promote transformations along the dimensions of economic geography: higher densities as cities grow; shorter distances as workers and businesses migrate closer to density; and fewer divisions as nations lower their economic borders and enter world markets to take advantage of scale and trade in specialized products. World Development Report 2009 concludes that the transformations along these three dimensions density, distance, and division are essential for development and should be encouraged. The conclusion is controversial. Slum-dwellers now number a billion, but the rush to cities continues. A billion people live in lagging areas of developing nations, remote from globalizations many benefits. And poverty and high mortality persist among the world’s bottom billion, trapped without access to global markets, even as others grow more prosperous and live ever longer lives. Concern for these three intersecting billions often comes with the prescription that growth must be spatially balanced. This report has a different message: economic growth will be unbalanced. To try to spread it out is to discourage it to fight prosperity, not poverty. But development can still be inclusive, even for people who start their lives distant from dense economic activity. For growth to be rapid and shared, governments must promote economic integration, the pivotal concept, as this report argues, in the policy debates on urbanization, territorial development, and regional integration. Instead, all three debates overemphasize place-based interventions. Reshaping Economic Geography reframes these debates to include all the instruments of integration spatially blind institutions, spatially connective infrastructure, and spatially targeted interventions. By calibrating the blend of these instruments, today’s developers can reshape their economic geography. If they do this well, their growth will still be unbalanced, but their development will be inclusive.Publication World Development Report 1984(New York: Oxford University Press, 1984)Long-term needs and sustained effort are underlying themes in this year's report. As with most of its predecessors, it is divided into two parts. The first looks at economic performance, past and prospective. The second part is this year devoted to population - the causes and consequences of rapid population growth, its link to development, why it has slowed down in some developing countries. The two parts mirror each other: economic policy and performance in the next decade will matter for population growth in the developing countries for several decades beyond. Population policy and change in the rest of this century will set the terms for the whole of development strategy in the next. In both cases, policy changes will not yield immediate benefits, but delay will reduce the room for maneuver that policy makers will have in years to come.Publication World Development Report 2017(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2017-01-30)Why are carefully designed, sensible policies too often not adopted or implemented? When they are, why do they often fail to generate development outcomes such as security, growth, and equity? And why do some bad policies endure? This book addresses these fundamental questions, which are at the heart of development. Policy making and policy implementation do not occur in a vacuum. Rather, they take place in complex political and social settings, in which individuals and groups with unequal power interact within changing rules as they pursue conflicting interests. The process of these interactions is what this Report calls governance, and the space in which these interactions take place, the policy arena. The capacity of actors to commit and their willingness to cooperate and coordinate to achieve socially desirable goals are what matter for effectiveness. However, who bargains, who is excluded, and what barriers block entry to the policy arena determine the selection and implementation of policies and, consequently, their impact on development outcomes. Exclusion, capture, and clientelism are manifestations of power asymmetries that lead to failures to achieve security, growth, and equity. The distribution of power in society is partly determined by history. Yet, there is room for positive change. This Report reveals that governance can mitigate, even overcome, power asymmetries to bring about more effective policy interventions that achieve sustainable improvements in security, growth, and equity. This happens by shifting the incentives of those with power, reshaping their preferences in favor of good outcomes, and taking into account the interests of previously excluded participants. These changes can come about through bargains among elites and greater citizen engagement, as well as by international actors supporting rules that strengthen coalitions for reform.Publication Africa's Future, Africa's Challenge : Early Childhood Care and Development in Sub-Saharan Africa(Washington, DC : World Bank, 2008)This book seeks to achieve a balance, describing challenges that are being faced as well as developments that are underway. It seeks a balance in terms of the voices heard, including not just voices of the North commenting on the South, but voices from the South, and in concert with the North. It seeks to provide the voices of specialists and generalists, of those from international and local organizations, from academia and the field. It seeks a diversity of views and values. Such diversity and complexity are the reality of Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) today. The major focus of this book is on SSA from the Sahel south. Approximately 130 million children between birth and age 6 live in SSA. Every year 27 million children are born, and every year 4.7 million children under age 5 die. Rates of birth and of child deaths are consistently higher in SSA than in any other part of the world; the under-5 mortality rate of 163 per 1,000 is twice that of the rest of the developing world and 30 times that of industrialized countries (UNICEF 2006). Of the children who are born, 65 percent will experience poverty, 14 million will be orphans affected by HIV/AIDS directly and within their families and one-third will experience exclusion because of their gender or ethnicity.Publication Ten Steps to a Results-Based Monitoring and Evaluation System : A Handbook for Development Practitioners(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2004)An effective state is essential to achieving socio-economic and sustainable development. With the advent of globalization, there are growing pressures on governments and organizations around the world to be more responsive to the demands of internal and external stakeholders for good governance, accountability and transparency, greater development effectiveness, and delivery of tangible results. Governments, parliaments, citizens, the private sector, Non-governmental Organizations (NGOs), civil society, international organizations, and donors are among the stakeholders interested in better performance. As demands for greater accountability and real results have increased, there is an attendant need for enhanced results-based monitoring and evaluation of policies, programs, and projects. This handbook provides a comprehensive ten-step model that will help guide development practitioners through the process of designing and building a results-based monitoring and evaluation system. These steps begin with a 'readiness assessment' and take the practitioner through the design, management, and importantly, the sustainability of such systems. The handbook describes each step in detail, the tasks needed to complete each one, and the tools available to help along the way.