Toward Next-Generation Performance Budgeting: Lessons from the Experiences of Seven Reforming Countries

Abstract

This study was initiated by the World Bank in response to sustained interest on the part of budget officials in Eastern Europe and Central Asia (ECA) to learn more about the experiences of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries and other governments in the region in implementing performance budgeting. Rather than learning about theory and best practice, budget officials wanted to know more about the practical challenges and how countries had adapted their approaches to their own context. Many countries in the ECA region have moved to performance budgeting but most have made limited progress. All performance budgeting efforts have a common goal—to focus the mindset and behavior of public officials on policy priorities and results. It is confusing, however, that there is no standard blueprint for these reforms, which may be referred to as results-based budgeting, program budgeting, performance-informed budgeting, or some other moniker. This report uses the term performance budgeting to refer to all the variants, but distinguishes it from such techniques as program evaluations and spending reviews. The findings are presented as a series of lessons that emerge from the cases studied; the full case studies can be found in part II, chapters 5 to 11. In each case the focus is on the national government, although state and local governments also use performance budgeting techniques. Efforts to systematically and critically compare the performance systems of different countries are relatively rare,and the research design choices for this study were deliberately intended to generate realistic insights based on capturing aspects of implementation that a purely survey-based approach cannot identify. The countries selected as case studies have been using performance budgeting for varying amounts of time. In structuring the case design, experts were asked not only to describe the current performance budgeting process and how it was working but also to account for precursors of these systems to gain an understanding of whether countries had engaged in learning over time. The study also tried to ground discussions of how different countries used performance information by reviewing how performance data are used in the same policy area of secondary education.