This paper explores the determinants of public employment across the world and finds that it is negatively associated with country size (by population) and positively associated with the income level. The findings show that a country's openness to trade is positively associated with public...

Comparing this repeat Public Expenditure and Financial Accountability (PEFA) assessment with the original 2007 assessment reveals overall improvement across most Performance Indicators, with slippage in some areas and no change in rating for others. This 2012 PEFA report also takes place at a...

Agriculture occupies a key position in the Kazakhstan economy. Although accounting for only 5 percent of GDP, agriculture continues to employ almost one third of the population. Studies of agriculture in Kazakhstan confirm significant un-tapped productive and export potential for the sector....

Improving access to quality education has been the backbone of several development strategies around the world and considerable public resources have been dedicated to achieving this goal. However, one could wonder whether increasing public education expenditure would drive better access to...

The Kenyan government remains committed to a planned fiscal consolidation pathway, which should help contain public debt stock at a sustainable level. Nonetheless, there are significant challenges stemming from a slowdown in revenue collection, a growing demand for transfers to county...

This paper presents composite indicators of the institutional and policy characteristics of educational systems, collated from the questionnaire responses of 26 Member countries. These indicators provide an overview of the institutional framework in the primary and secondary education sector and...

This paper highlights some key policy issues regarding the performance of public expenditure and proposes an analytical framework for its assessment. The framework distinguishes three economic objectives of policies in the pursuit of better performance of public expenditure: macroeconomic...

In most OECD countries, public spending rose steadily as a share of GDP over the past decades to the mid-1990s, but this trend has since abated. The spending pressures stemming from the continued expansion of social programmes have been partly compensated by transient or one-off factors....

This paper studies whether budget rigidities affect the probability of countries getting into fiscal distress and reduce the likelihood of governments performing fiscal adjustments. Budget rigidities are constraints that limit the ability of the government to change the size and structure of the...

This study investigates the capacity of governments to reallocate spending across different functions of the government. It mobilises the COFOG dataset for the period 1996 - 2017, which allows comparing public spending mixes at detailed levels in ways that are consistent across countries and...