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International Monetary Fund. European Dept.
The Selected Issues paper on France identifies areas where scope for savings or efficiency gains exist based on an analysis of public spending on key categories and related outcomes relative to peers. Reform of social protection, health, education, and civil service should preserve or improve outcomes while generating savings that would help meet medium-term adjustment needs. In parallel, rationalizing costly, distortive, or inefficient tax expenditures would allow for base broadening and partially offset permanent revenue losses from the rebalancing of revenues away from labor and production taxes. Social protection spending accounts for more than half of the spending gap with peers. Achieving more efficiency in local public administration will be critical to ensure the benefits of decentralization in France. Adequate subnational capacity and transparent multilevel governance, including efficient co-ordination mechanisms across levels of government is important to promote efficient public service delivery and regional development. Rationalizing and redesigning tax expenditures would improve their efficiency and generate substantial savings.
International Monetary Fund
At the time of the 2005 review of the Fund’s transparency policy, it was agreed that information on key trends in implementation of the transparency policy would be circulated to the Board regularly, along with lists indicating the publication status of reports discussed by the Board. The set of tables provided in this report updates the last Key Trends2 with information on documents published through December 2009.
International Monetary Fund
This paper develops a political-economy model of the budget process focusing on the common pool problem of the public budget. We show that the externality arising from the fact that public spending tends to be targeted at individual groups in society while the tax burden is widely dispersed creates a bias towards excessive expenditures and debt. This bias can be reduced by introducing elements of centralization in the budget process, that is, institutional structures that strengthen a comprehensive view of the budget over the particularistic view of the spending ministers and the members of parliament. Using examples from EC countries, we show how budget processes lack or possess such elements. We then present empirical evidence supporting the claim that centralizing elements reduce the deficit bias. The last section concludes with models for reform of the budget process.
Mr. Robert Holzmann
This paper analyzes budgetary subsidy policy issues that arise when centrally planned economies move toward a market economy. The analysis suggests that subsidy reduction, to be successful, has to be embedded into an overall economic reform program and that during the program’s execution, former implicit subsidies are likely to become budgetized. Furthermore, additional pressure on the budget, caused by enterprise restructuring or the introduction of social safety net provisions, necessitates careful policy design. Comprehensive budgetary reform is required to prevent budgetary slippages during the transition process.