Cameroon’s 2005 Article IV Consultation reports that tangible progress has been made in the health and education sectors, and a number of social indicators have improved significantly. The deterioration in fiscal performance and related weaknesses in fiscal management could, in the longer...

The Report on the Observance of Standards and Codes (ROSC) Data Module provides a review of Greece’s data dissemination practices against the IMF’s Special Data Dissemination Standard (SDDS), complemented by the in-depth assessment of the quality of Greece’s national...

The report focuses on the social sectors, agriculture, and governance. However, the report fails to highlight the importance of tackling decisively certain structural reforms that are critical to achieving the poverty reduction objectives of sustaining growth and reducing poverty. The...

The Austrian government is about to introduce a new fiscal management framework. The first step is to introduce a medium-term budgetary framework, including an expenditure rule. The paper focuses on this first step. The purpose is to describe and evaluate the Austrian model in light of other...

The paper reviews the changing nature of intergovernmental fiscal relations between the provinces and the central government in China over the past two decades and provides an assessment of the success of previous reforms in meeting their objectives. Key existing weaknesses in the current system...

With increasing frequency, the IMF has assisted middle-income countries, especially emerging economies, in adopting the types of budget reforms that have been introduced in many Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries - reforms that emphasize performance and...

This 2005 Article IV Consultation highlights that recent accession to the European Union and gains in growth performance reinforced the Czech Republic’s position as one of the most open and developed economies among the new member states. Thanks to substantial foreign direct investment,...

This 2002 Article IV Consultation on Portugal highlights that after an extended strong economic expansion, the GDP growth stalled in 2002 and, at 0.5 percent, fell below the euro area average for the first time in almost a decade. The growth slowdown reflected a broad-based decline in domestic...

Country-specific factors prevent a strong linear relationship between the legislature's budgetary powers and the extent of its separation from the executive. Electoral and voting systems, bicameralism, constitutional and legal constraints, voluntary contracts of political parties, and...

In the past decade, developing countries (DCs) have been encouraged to reform their public expenditure management systems and have increasingly embarked on major projects to computerize their government operations. Most popular among these have been projects to computerize government accounting...