Public Finance Management Project

closed

The Public Finance Management Project seeks to strengthen Slovakia's institutional capacity in the use of public resources effectively, and transparently. The first component will improve the budget process, by helping the Government with the allocation, and operation of public expenditures, by linking policy decisions to budgeting, making strategic policy choices through program prioritization within available resources; increasing funding, in order to plan ahead sustainable programs; supporting an increased autonomy, and incentives for effective use of funds; generating a budget process in which the regular evaluation of outcomes feeds into future budgetary choices; fostering capacity building within the Ministry of Finance (MOF) for expenditure reviews; and, developing policy analysis for alternative financing, to support a decentralized system of public service delivery. The second component, strengthening macroeconomic capacity in the MOF, would help establish a core of macro-analyses in the MOF, and the Government, through technical and organizational improvements, including developing institutional links within the MOF, and the State Treasury; assigning a central role to macroeconomic forecasts as the basis for establishing resources for the budget process; and, improving the quality of medium term macroeconomic, and fiscal forecasts, by improving the technical quality of the models used. The third component, support for debt management and treasury, would assist the Government in the development of an institutional structure in which accountability is clearly defined, distinguishing between debt formulation and management strategy; ensure a transparent management of public debt, and financial assets, appropriately balancing risks and costs. Moreover, the development of a domestic debt market and legal framework will be pursued, identifying implicit and explicit contingent liabilities, establishing a monitoring system that provide a quality assessment of public accounting, facilitating a new treasury system. Finally, the fourth component will support program coordination, and project management, finance technical assistance, and design appropriate institutional arrangements.