Economic Management Support Project

closed

Closed

The development objective of the proposed Economic Management Support Project (EMSP) is to increase the efficiency of Burundi's macroeconomic, financial, and administrative management by strengthening accountability and transparency through improved procedures and controls. This in turn will raise the effectiveness of public expenditure for growth and poverty reduction, and help reduce transaction costs for private economic activity. The project has the following five components: Component 1) would help the Ministry of Planning and the "Institut National des Statistiques et d'Etudes Economiques" (ISTEEBU) to develop instruments and collect more complete and comprehensive social and economic data for national accounts and other economic reports to be produced by the Government. This component would also strengthen data management in the economic core agencies which would improve the quality of economic statistics for decision making. Component 2) Since the early 1990s, many documents produced by donors (Bank and IMF among others) and the Government have underlined the sore state of financial and administrative management, characterized by its inefficiency, formalism, opacity and arbitrariness. Five main constraints have been identified: (i) regular procedures have been abandoned; (ii) legal texts and manuals have disappeared; (iii) control procedures and responsibilities are redundant, and inefficient; (iv) information is neither managed nor utilized; and (v) training and retraining is inexistent. In the budgeting system, the problems are: (i) procedural deterioration; (ii) proliferation of extra budgetary accounts, special funds and special treasury accounts; (iii) abandonment of budget annuality; (iv) abandonment of specialization of budget accounts; (v) late or inexistent regularization; (vi) incomplete, inaccurate and late accounting for commitments; and (vii) lack of regularization procedures. In payroll management, the largest item of expenditure, coherence between the payroll and civil service management is lacking, resulting in: (i) proliferation of non-salary allowances; (ii) swelling of extraneous payments; (iii) inflated pay scales; (iv) exceptional promotions; (v) non-enforcement of penalties; (vi) lack of incentives; and (vii) lack of training. Component 3) Reforming Public Procurement System and Modernizing Private Sector Legal and Regulatory Framework. Component 4) Defining Legal and Judicial Reform Strategy and Stregthening Oversight Structures Capacity. Component 5) Overall project coordination, management and administration is enthrusted to three structures: the Steering Committee, the Technical Committee, and the Project Coordination Unit.

FY17 - Public Administration

World Bank Group

Project

Government