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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.
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.
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.
Ms. Victoria Gunnarsson
and
Mr. Etibar Jafarov
This paper assesses the relative efficiency of government spending on health care and education in Croatia by using the so-called Data Envelopment Analysis. The analysis finds evidence of significant inefficiencies in Croatia's spending on health care and education, related to inadequate cost recovery, weaknesses in the financing mechanisms and institutional arrangements, weak competition in the provision of these services, and weaknesses in targeting public subsidies on health care and education. These inefficiencies suggest that government spending on health and education could be reduced without undue sacrifices in the quality of these services. The paper identifies ways to do that.
Ms. Victoria Gunnarsson
,
Sergio Lugaresi
, and
Marijn Verhoeven
The paper assesses the financial situation of the health sector in the Slovak Republic. It also evaluates the efficiency of health expenditures and service delivery in comparison to the OECD and other new EU member states and suggests avenues for cost recovery and reform. The health sector of the Slovak Republic is plagued by financial problems. To turn around health system finances and achieve larger gains in health outcomes, the efficiency of health spending needs to increase and the mix and quality of real health resources need to be improved. Although Slovak's overall health spending efficiency is on par with that of the OECD, substantial inefficiencies occur in the process of transforming intermediate health inputs into health outcomes. Efficiency may be enhanced by containing the cost of drugs and reducing reliance on hospital care. Also, although cost-effectiveness may be relatively high at present, its sustainability in the future is an issue.
Mr. Todd D. Mattina
and
Ms. Victoria Gunnarsson
This paper assesses the relative efficiency and flexibility of public spending in Slovenia compared to the advanced and new EU member states. Spending on health care, education, and social protection is relatively high in Slovenia without achieving correspondingly better outcomes. Inefficiencies appear to stem from the financing mechanisms for social services, institutional arrangements, and the weak targeting of social benefits. In addition, the composition of spending appears to be strongly tilted towards nondiscretionary items that reduce the fiscal room for maneuver. Greater flexibility is needed to facilitate the reallocation of relatively inefficient expenditure into higher priorities. In this manner, medium-term expenditure rationalization can focus on reducing inefficient outlays rather than restraining traditionally flexible components of the budget, such as public investment.
International Monetary Fund
This 2007 Article IV Consultation highlights that economic performance of Slovenia strengthened in 2006, supported by a recovery in investment and continued growth spillovers from the European Union. Declining real interest rates in the run-up to euro adoption on January 1, 2007 helped sustain credit growth and domestic demand. The strong economy boosted job creation, while unemployment declined and capacity utilization reached record high levels. Growth is projected to slow down slightly in 2007–08, as the investment boom decelerates.