Spending Review Research Articles

New development: Income and gender equality, Spanish spending reviews and public values

IMPACT This article provides insights for policy-makers and public administrators interested in public value and policy analysis. By examining the recent experience of spending reviews in Spain, the study showcases how gender and income equality can be integrated into this process. The authors identify potential trade-offs between promoting equality and ensuring fiscal sustainability, as well as the tensions that may arise between gender and income equality objectives. Public administrators and politicians will benefit from understanding the potential conflicts and trade-offs between different public values. Overall, this article underscores the necessity of comprehensive impact analysis in public policy—promoting transparency and informed decision-making that aligns with societal values and needs.

“No Less Than 4%”: A Policy Review of China's Fiscal Spending on Education, 2000–2020

Purpose This study aims to review the policy background of China's ever-growing fiscal spending on education and discusses the aggregate growth of its national fiscal spending on education and the responsible bodies involved. Design/Approach/Methods This study adopts policy analysis and descriptive statistics as its primary research methods. Findings Since 2012, China's national fiscal spending on education has accounted for no less than 4% of its gross domestic product for nine consecutive years. Additionally, over 80% of China's total education spending is underpinned by state finances, with the country boasting the largest education system in the world. While compulsory education accounts for approximately half of China's national fiscal spending on education, higher education reflects the highest budgetary education spending per student. Furthermore, China has been actively increasing its fiscal spending on pre-school education. Originality/Value The findings of this study have implications for understanding the status quo and changes in China's education spending.

How a spending review of compensation spending changed government policy in South Africa

ABSTRACT This paper examines the influence of compensation spending reviews on government policy by analysing the case of South Africa, focusing on an extended review of the drivers of payroll costs. It addresses the decision by the government to renege on a wage agreement with public sector unions and the subsequent backlash from labour unions, and explains how spending reviews contributed to this. The paper outlines the methodology used for the analysis and summarises the key findings of the compensation spending reviews conducted between 2017 and 2020. It also discusses the implications of the decision and subsequent developments for compensation spending in South Africa.

Applying spending review theory to developing countries: The case of South Africa

ABSTRACT The seminal spending review (SR) theoretical framework by Catalano & Erbacci [2018. A theoretical framework for spending review policies at a time of widespread recession. OECD Journal on Budgeting 17(2), 9–24] draws on the cutback management and related academic literature to articulate the first theory for explaining the ability of medium-term SRs conducted after the global financial crisis of 2008 to effect targeted savings. This literature is however dominated by advanced economies with sophisticated public financial management systems. Comparatively little attention, however, has been paid to theoretical perspectives on developing countries, like South Africa. This article applies this theoretical framework by Catalano and Erbacci to the South African SR initiative in order to interrogate its theoretical and empirical relevance. Proposals are made for enhancing the operationalisation of the organisational and process dimensions of C&E’s theoretical framework to lay a foundation for future empirical research and its policy implications for South Africans SRs are explored.

Integrating decision analysis into South Africa's spending review methodology

ABSTRACT In 2016, the Government Technical Advisory Centre (GTAC) delivered training on the spending review methodology. During the training, it became evident that officials were not accustomed to analysing expenditure and performance data in the manner required for a spending review. They found it difficult to translate their analysis into findings and recommendations. In 2021, GTAC introduced the concept of decision analysis into its training curriculum. The primary reason for introducing decision analysis in the methodology was to empower officials with the tools needed to synthesise expenditure and performance data, identify diverse options and formulate evidence-based recommendations. In turn, it was hoped that these recommendations would then prompt decisions and actions by the political executive or senior managers. This research note explains how decision analysis can be used to outline the range of choices available to officials based on the analysis and findings from their spending reviews. In particular, it details the South African experience in using decision trees as part of the spending review methodology to enable government officials to think through their findings, message them appropriately and craft actionable recommendations.

Spending reviews’ capacity-building initiatives: Reflections on the experience and methodologies employed

ABSTRACT This study aims to reflect on the spending reviews’ capacity-building initiatives undertaken over the years, the experience and methodology employed. It discusses the feedback collected from survey questionnaires developed during and upon completion of each spending review capacity-building initiative and shares a case study of a completed and actioned spending review. The paper details the contribution of spending review training in building capacity of officials working in National and Provincial Treasuries in South Africa. It is argued that the spending review capacity-building initiatives contributed to the adoption of spending reviews as part of the annual budget process, culminating into the issuing of a government-wide guideline to use it as a tool in budgeting processes from 2021. This research not only contributes to the body of work on knowledge-transfer theory, but also offers lessons learnt in undertaking capacity building for public sector officials to promote knowledge transfer.

Regionalisation process and the pattern of socio-residential specialisation between the crisis of the productive and redistributive spheres in the regional assemblage of Milan

The Milanese urban region can be understood as a trans-scalar assemblage, composed not only of the diverse territories within it and the materialities and individuals present there. It is also shaped by regulatory frameworks, such as administrative boundaries, resource allocation choices, the effects of the 2008 crisis on the population’s income, and the related spending review reforms. This paper explores the mechanisms and patterns of unequal accumulation of capital, both private and public, driven by the process of socio-residential specialisation taking place in the Milanese assemblage at the intersection between the neighbourhood effects generated by the overlap between regionalised residential geographies and the stability of municipal boundaries and the advent of the 2008 economic crisis, which acted on both productive and redistributive spheres. What emerges is a process of progressive socio-economic specialisation and segregation of the territories that make up the urban region.

The development of a spending review methodology in a developing country context

ABSTRACT This article discusses the spending review methodology developed in the South African government. A typical spending review combines a deep institutional and policy evaluation with extensive expenditure analysis and cost modelling. The article discusses how, in the context of a developing country, the spending review methodology had to adapt to local conditions, such as constraints around political and institutional autonomy and cooperation, the skills level of government officials, data availability and communication around a reform agenda. The article outlines how, in responding to these challenges, the South African spending review methodology developed a six step modularised approach that standardised the methodology and provided clear guidance to civil servants, consultants and political leadership. This has allowed a sophisticated analytical process to be widely adopted in the public sector and could be of methodological value to developed and developing countries alike.

Using models to cost government policies and programmes in South Africa

ABSTRACT The purpose of costing new and existing government programmes is to mobilise and systematise information to present different options for how to move forward. There has always been a need for such information, and this need will remain, given the imperatives to improve the use of government funds to meet social needs. It is therefore important to build capacity in government to do costing studies, and to use costing information in policy-making and management processes. This paper explores the history of policy costing in South Africa. It shows how the experience gained from the early policy costing projects fed into the methodology for Spending Reviews developed by the Government Technical Advisory Centre (GTAC) in 2013. It then documents key methodological lessons learned from our experience with costing policies. The paper ends with a few observations regarding the outlook for policy costing in South Africa.

Better to give? A systematic review of prosocial spending and happiness.

Considerable research has amassed a plethora of evidence indicating that prosocial spending has a consistently positive effect on individual happiness. Nevertheless, this effect may be subject to various influencing factors that researchers have yet to systematically examine. The purpose of this systematic review is twofold: first, to document the empirical evidence of the relationship between prosocial spending and happiness, and second, to systematically categorize the influential factors affecting this relationship from the perspective of mediators and moderators. To achieve this goal, this systematic review incorporates the influential factors identified by researchers into an intra-individual, inter-individual, and methodological framework. Ultimately, this review includes 14 empirical studies that have effectively fulfilled the aforementioned two objectives. The systematic review concludes that engaging in prosocial spending consistently demonstrates a positive effect on individual happiness, irrespective of cultural or demographic factors, although the complexity of this relationship necessitates consideration of mediating and moderating factors, as well as methodological nuances.

Political Campaign Professionalization in Lithuanian Elections

The article analyzes the extent to which the professionalization of Lithuanian political campaigns has changed over the last 30 years. To achieve this, the article employs two main methods. First, it reviews existing research on election campaign professionalization. Second, it presents the findings from a case study of Lithuanian political campaigns. The analysis draws on data from interviews with PR professionals and politicians conducted over the past two decades (46 interviews). The analysis also includes a data review of party spending in parliamentary campaigns. Through these methods, the analysis finds that both candidates and professional political consultants increasingly view political campaigns as important. Professional consultants play a significant role in campaign preparation and management in all parties, with major functions implemented by external campaign professionals being related to marketing strategies and communication management. Furthermore, contemporary Lithuanian political campaigns are often permanent and centralized, using a variety of marketing tools and instruments to research the electorate and prepare advertising campaigns and messages. The study concludes that Lithuanian election campaigns are gradually becoming more professionalized across all parties. However, the degree of professionalization varies depending on the financial and human resources available to specific party campaigns.

Spending reviews and the Government of Canada: From episodic to institutionalized capabilities and repertoires

AbstractFollowing surges of spending and staff hiring to address the COVID‐19 pandemic, the Trudeau government announced a strategic policy review in the 2022 Budget to secure savings of $6 billion. There has been little apparent progress by May 2023 and opaque communications. This is surprising because Canada was once considered an international exemplar for spending reviews, needs to learn from the pandemic experience, has a worrisome medium‐to‐long‐term federal spending trajectory, and the governance and economic context has rapidly evolved. This article identifies different kinds of spending reviews and design considerations, reviews Canada's experience with reviews since the early 1980s, considers recent OECD experience and exemplars, and argues that its spending reviews have become increasingly selective and closed. We suggest the Canadian government should institutionalize annual spending reviews, which can be scaled up or down, and that this points to more fundamental issues for reform and building a new governance culture.

Gender perspectives in spending review

Public finances will be under increasing pressure in the medium term. Tools such as spending review, which help governments prioritise and reallocate spending, are likely to be increasingly important. Integrating a gender perspective will ensure that budget reprioritisation does not increase gender gaps, but instead supports the achievement of gender goals – which can bring economic and fiscal dividends. This paper highlights the different ways in which countries are experimenting with integrating a gender perspective to spending review, as well as some of the key considerations that should be taken into account in the process.

Public finances after the COVID-19 pandemic

OECD nations face particularly powerful fiscal pressures over the coming decades. To handle these pressures without lapsing into fiscally irresponsibility, they will need to make courageous decisions on both the expenditure and tax sides. This paper looks at the implications of this for budgeting. It focuses particularly on reallocation and expenditure discipline, including the role of spending review, and the design and implementation of expenditure ceilings. The question of the relevance of net worth as a fiscal policy measure is also discussed, as is the potential for efficiency savings to relieve the fiscal pressure on governments.

How to Design and Institutionalize Spending Reviews

How to Design and Institutionalize Spending Reviews

OECD Best Practices for Spending Reviews

Spending reviews are widely used in OECD countries. They have become a core instrument for expenditure prioritisation and reallocation and a permanent feature of the budget process in many countries. Spending reviews provide governments with means to support the sustainability of public finances through systematic analysis of existing expenditure. This is particularly important as baseline expenditure has grown unsustainably in certain spending areas across OECD countries. This paper looks at how spending reviews are applied in OECD countries and presents best practices for using spending reviews. Every country is different and uses different approaches. However, there are common features to successful spending reviews where valuable lessons can be drawn from experiences across OECD countries which are reflected in the best practices.

Eppur si muove: an evaluation of museum policy reform in Italy

This study evaluates the effectiveness of a novel cultural policy to recover the valorization function of Italian state museums by increasing managerial autonomy. The policy is part of the Franceschini reform, introduced in 2014, that concerns the governance of cultural institutions and was justified by the severe budget constraints resulting from economic crisis and a spending review. Given the staggered implementation of the reform across 32 museums that obtained special autonomy, we apply a difference-in-differences strategy that allows to properly investigate the causal effect of the policy reform on museums’ outcome measures of exhibition function, as visitors and revenue from admissions. Our findings robustly support the effectiveness of the cultural policy reform in terms these outcomes. Although we provide some suggestive evidence of the efficacy of museums’ management (through a number of communication and supplementary services), this study suffers of the limitations due to the lack of more appropriate measures on how successful changes in management have been. However, results aim to offer policy recommendations in favor of greater managerial and financial autonomy of state museums that, while preserving their conservation function, can promote the widespread utilization of collections ensuring museums’ greater sustainability.

Spending Review pada APBD Kota Bandung di Masa Pandemi Covid-19

AbstractEfficiency review is one of the methods of spending review, is something that the government must do, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic, which makes the government have to refocus and reallocate the budget on a fairly large scale. The Bandung City Government has been refocusing and reallocating the budget since the beginning of the pandemic, causing changes to the structure of the updated Regional Revenue and Expenditure Budget (APBD) of the year 2020. The research uses a descriptive method with a qualitative approach and the data analysis technique uses in this study is the data analysis method according to Miles and Huberman (1994) which includes the process od data reduction, data display, and conclusion drawing/verification. The results show that in the period of two fiscal years, namely 2019-2020, there was a deviation between the budget allocation and the real needs of the Bandung City Government. However, when viewed in terms of benchmarking analysis, the performance of the Bandung City Government is quite good.

'Deep disappointment’ as government rules out proposals for a national prescribed drug dependence helpline

The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) will not be taking forward recommendations to set up a helpline to support patients struggling with prescribed drug dependence, The Pharmaceutical Journal has learned. This follows the failure of a spending review bid for the helpline submitted to HM Treasury in September 2021, meeting minutes released through […]

We are (still) educators

The long-awaited Comprehensive Spending Review, originally due in 2020, arrived this autumn, and at long last the early years sector had the chance to formally put our case for increased investment to the Treasury.