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International Monetary Fund. Fiscal Affairs Dept.
Slovenia’s public investment management institutions, as assessed by the PIMA, perform well overall relative to European peers. Availability of funding for public investment, fiscal targets and rules, maintenance funding and monitoring of public assets are areas of strength. Key areas for improvement are appraisal and selection of projects, procurement, and portfolio management and oversight. The near-term challenge will be to address bottlenecks in the execution of capital projects. Over the medium to longer term, tighter fiscal constraints will raise the premium for stronger appraisal and selection processes.
International Monetary Fund. European Dept.
The 2024 Article IV Consultation highlights that Slovenia’s economy recovered well from the pandemic, only to be hit by spillovers from the war in Ukraine, followed by severe flooding in 2023. After a strong recovery in 2021, growth slowed in 2022 because of adverse energy price spillovers from the war in Ukraine and supply chain disruptions. Growth is expected to accelerate, driven by a recovery in domestic demand. Inflation is projected to continue to decline. The outlook remains subject to high uncertainty, with risks stemming from an intensification of regional conflicts, renewed commodity price volatility, and lower trading partners’ demand on the external side and labor shortages and broader capacity constraints on the domestic side. Severe weather events also remain a risk. Given underlying increase in core public spending in recent years, age-related spending pressures, and relatively high public debt, sustained fiscal consolidation and fiscal reforms, including in taxation, the pension, public wage and health systems, are needed to underpin long-term public debt sustainability. Deeper structural reforms would help boost growth and foster income convergence. Longer-term limits on employment growth call for reforms enhancing productivity growth, including improving regulatory quality, building human capital, and deepening the financial sector.
Mr. Raphael A Espinoza
In this paper, we estimate the aggregate and sectoral fiscal multipliers of EU Structural Investment (ESI) Funds and of public investment at the EU level. We complement these results with a specific application to the case of Slovenia. We first analyze aggregate data and find large and significant multipliers and strong crowding-in of private investment. Our main findings show that positive shocks to ESI Funds are followed by an increase in output that ranges from 1.2 percent on impact, to 1.8 percent after 1 year, and by an increase in private investment between 0.7 and 0.8 percent of GDP. We address country heterogeneity by dividing countries according to key characteristics that have been known to affect multipliers. In particular, we find higher multipliers in a group of CEE countries that are important recipients of European funds and are characterized by fixed exchange rate regimes and sound public investment governance (e.g. Croatia and Slovenia). We also complement the aggregate analysis by estimating the effect of different types of public investment and the effect of public investment on different sectors of the economy.
Florian Misch
,
Mr. Brian Olden
,
Mr. Marcos Poplawski Ribeiro
, and
Lamya Kejji
Traditionally, fiscal data for policy analysis are derived from official reports that, depending on the country, are published either monthly, quarterly or annually, often with significant time lags. However, innovations in digitalization of government payments and accounting systems mean that real-time daily fiscal data exist in many countries. In this paper, we argue that these data contain valuable, but underutilized and underexploited information. Possible uses include (i) realtime fiscal surveillance which allows for much more timely responses to emerging signs of fiscal stress, and (ii) nowcasting economic activity, which is especially useful in countries where higher frequency GDP statistics are unavailable.
International Monetary Fund. Fiscal Affairs Dept.
This paper discusses key findings and recommendations of the Technical Assistance report on establishing a spending review process in Slovenia. Slovenia’s fragile fiscal situation requires further consolidation to ensure that the upward trajectory of public debt does not threaten long-term fiscal sustainability. Spending in the education sector is the fourth-highest spending level. Spending pressures also need to be explicitly identified, quantified, and included in the spending review to better inform the government’s decision making process. There is also a need to update existing performance information associated with government expenditure programs to ensure that more meaningful information focused on achieving desired outcomes is developed to better inform future reviews.
International Monetary Fund. European Dept.
This Selected Issues paper examines social spending reform and fiscal savings in Slovenia. Rising expenditure has been at the root of Slovenia’s fiscal deterioration since the onset of the crisis. The paper explores reform options to reduce Slovenia’s social spending over the medium and long term. It discusses key features of the pension system, and analyzes the evolution of pension spending in the absence of reforms. The paper also examines the health and education spending and provides a framework to assess their efficiency relative to other countries.
International Monetary Fund
The global crisis exacerbated the Slovenian economy’s previous imbalances in the fiscal, financial, and real sectors. The authorities agreed that fiscal consolidation including pension, health care, and financial management is essential for sustainable recovery. The Bank of Slovenia emphasizes that banks’ governance and capitalization should be enhanced, regardless of ownership. The authorities suggested that structural reforms in labor and product markets are critical to boost potential growth. The authorities agreed that maintaining competitiveness is crucial for Slovenia as it has a small and export-dependent economy.
Adam Leive
This paper exploits the staggered adoption of major concurrent health reforms in countries in Europe and Central Asia after 1990 to estimate their impact on public health expenditure, utilization, and avoidable deaths. While the health systems all derived from the same paradigm under central planning, they have since introduced changes to policies regarding cost-sharing, provider payment, financing, and the rationalization of hospital infrastructure. Social health insurance is predicted to increase this share, although the leads of both social health insurance and primary care fee-for-service suggest endogeneity may be an issue with the outpatient share regressions. Provider payment reforms produce the largest impact on spending, with fee-for-service increasing spending and patient-based payment reducing it. The impact on avoidable deaths is generally negligible, but there is some evidence of improvements due to fee-for-service. Considering the corresponding relative reduction in inpatient admissions and the incentives fee-for-service provides to deliver additional services, perhaps there is an overprovision of services in the primary care setting and an underutilization of more specialized hospital services.
Mia Pavesic-Skerlep
and
Mr. Eivind Tandberg
This paper aims to clarify possible systemic bottlenecks to the introduction of advanced PFM reforms in the SEE countries. It relates key fiscal developments to PFM reform processes over the last 15 years. PFM reform strategies must be realistic, with clear objectives and timetables, and with strong country ownership. Among the advanced reforms, some aspects of medium-term budgeting seems to be somewhat less challenging than performance-oriented budgeting, and it could be rational to make sure that there is solid progress in this area first. When developing performance budgets, countries should consider focusing initial efforts on the areas that are most suitable for performance management, such as education and health.
International Monetary Fund
The first analysis focuses on external stability, an important issue in view of Croatia’s external imbalances and the requirements of the IMF’s 2007 Decision on Bilateral Surveillance. The paper shows that the real exchange rate is broadly in line with economic fundamentals and that external debt dynamics are sustainable as long as macroeconomic policies remain strong. The second analysis finds significant inefficiencies in Croatia’s social spending. It also discusses several reform measures to reduce inefficiencies in public spending and generate budgetary savings to reduce the general government deficit.