Blended Learning Journey

• E-LEARNING phase, May 18 to June 7, workload ~3 hrs / week
  We promoted a common understanding of the role and key steps of the budget preparation in the budget cycle, and the role of public officials at line ministries in this process.
• Face-to-face WORKSHOP in Ljubljana, June 13-15
  We discussed sectoral policy making and its fiscal implications, ways to improve the quality of planning and budget cycles, and the implications of the EU pre-accession agenda for fiscal programming.

Background

The budget is a political instrument and the government’s main tool to allocate resources to achieve political priorities. All policies and priorities that derive from the planning process need to be costed to ensure that they are realistic and can be accommodated within the resource constraint identified during the budget preparation process. That process includes a range of necessary steps, from preliminary analyses and forecasts, submission of budget requests by ministries and other government units, the review and decision by the executive, to its official presentation to the legislature.

Ministries of finance are in charge of assuring sound budget preparation processes, yet their success significantly depends on capacities of line ministries, whose capacity development has been less supported by international partners. Finance officials of line ministries are a crucial link in the budget process. They form the interface between the policy cycles of the line ministries and the annual budget cycle.

Line ministries’ policy cycles are typically organized around “programs” or policy areas with one or more central objectives, and with a multi-annual perspective. They include the stages of policy preparation, decision-making, policy execution, evaluation and revision. Finance officials of line ministries have to mediate between the Ministry of Finance and the sectoral directorates of the line ministries in order to make sure that sectoral plans are consistent with the financial limits, which are decided in the annual budget cycle.

Topics addressed

The following topics have been discussed:

• The role of budget preparation in the budget cycle
• Key steps in budget preparation
• Budget submission processes in South East Europe
• Sectoral policy making and its fiscal implications
• Structural reforms in the light of EU accession
• Integration of structural reforms / sectoral policy priorities into the budget

How you will benefit

After this learning journey, participants are better able to:

• Explain budget preparation processes at line ministries
• Understand sectoral policy making and its fiscal implications
• Describe fiscal coordination challenges
• Identify strong and weak features of line ministries’ budget preparation and their interface with ministries of finance

Target audience

The blended learning initiative had been designed primarily for mid-to-senior level officials working at line ministries (and other budget users) who actively deal with budget preparation, strategic planning and budget decision-making. Mid-to-senior level officials working at ministries of finance who deal with line ministries were also kindly invited to apply.

No fee was charged for officials working in the public sector, and meals during the workshop have been provided. Flights, airport transfers in Slovenia, and accommodation for the workshop have been arranged for up to two participants per beneficiary country, i.e. Albania, Armenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Georgia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia, Slovenia, Turkey, and Ukraine. Candidates had to be approved by the CEF.

[Some participants stayed for another day in Ljubljana for the back-to-back Seminar on Revenue Management and Mobilization in Sectors, organized at the CEF on June 15-16.]

Contributions from participants

Participants have been actively engaged in discussions throughout the E-Learning phase and the workshop, and shared their country experiences and challenges in preparing their budget submissions. During the E-Learning phase, they have discussed recent PFM innovations in their respective country, their ministry’s budget preparation process, and fiscal coordination challenges they face. The workshop included group exercises to assess the fiscal implications of structural reforms, gave participants a hands-on opportunity to simulate budget negotiations, and involved the preparation of an advice for the minister on ways to improve the budget submission process.

This learning initiative has been delivered in English. Participants were therefore required to be proficient in English.

FACULTY

MOJMIR MRAK, Professor of International Finance, University of Ljubljana, and CEF Senior Program Advisor

Mojmir Mrak has been lecturing at the CEF since 2004, and has supported CEF’s program for many years as a CEF Associate Fellow. Since 2016, he is a CEF Senior Program Advisor. Mr. Mrak is a Jean Monnet Chair professor of international finance at the University of Ljubljana and a regular visiting professor at post-graduate programs of the universities of Siena and Vienna. His main research fields include capital flows, trade and project finance, and EU institutional and public finance issues. Mr. Mrak is author of many books and articles. He has served as a consultant to numerous international organizations and several governments in South East Europe.

Mr. Mrak has more than 20 years of experience in designing and implementing the Slovenian government's policy in areas of international finance and EU accession. In 1992-1996, he was the chief external debt negotiator of Slovenia. In addition, he was responsible for the early credit arrangements of Slovenia with the EBRD and the World Bank. In 1998-2002, he was chief advisor of the Slovenian government on financial aspects of the country’s EU accession. Within this framework, he was responsible for negotiations about Slovenia’s financial package. In 2003-2006, he coordinated the Slovene government’s activities with respect to the 2007-2013 financial perspective of the EU, and has been involved in negotiations of its 2014-2020 successor.

DIRK-JAN KRAAN, Public Financial Management Consultant

Dirk-Jan Kraan holds MA degrees in Law and Economics from Erasmus University in Rotterdam, and a PhD degree in Economics from the same university. In 1980-2002, he worked in several positions in the Directorate General of the Budget of the Dutch Ministry of Finance, and then as head of the Division of Policy Review of the Inspectorate of Finance (Expenditure Division).

Mr. Kraan joined the OECD in 2002 as a senior economist in the Budgeting and Public Expenditures Division of the Directorate of Public Governance and Territorial Development. At the OECD, he was among other things responsible for the Eastern European program of the Budgeting and Expenditure Division and for the OECD Value for Money Study on the organization of central government. He was based at the CEF first as the IMF PFM Advisor for South East Europe in 2012-2014, and later as CEF Advisor in 2014-2015. In this second position, he wrote a paper on strengthening the role of line ministries in the budget process, elaborating in particular the cases of Croatia, Slovenia and the Netherlands.

DUNCAN LAST, Public Financial Management Advisor for South East Europe, IMF

Duncan Last is the IMF PFM Advisor for South East Europe, having previously been based in IMF headquarters for the last 8 years. Prior to that he had been working in the field for 20 years covering various topics in public financial management, including: PFM advisor in the IMF’s AFRITAC East Regional Technical Assistance Center; budget and treasury advisor in Slovenia also covering various countries in the region, during which time he helped establish the Center of Excellence in Finance; budget and IFMIS advisor in Mali and Papua New Guinea, debt management advisor in Papua New Guinea, and debt management software designer at the Commonwealth Secretariat in UK.

MAJDA SEDEJ, Economic and Fiscal Management Expert, USAID Business Enabling Project

Majda Sedej is an expert in PFM and economic policy, working for the USAID Business Enabling Project, Cardno Emerging Markets in Serbia. She has been advising the Serbian Ministry of Finance on budget process reform, and has led a team of consultants to help develop a program and performance budget framework and implement it in the Serbian government sector. As part of this process, she worked as a technical advisor for the Ministry of Agriculture and Environmental Protection, Ministry of Science and Education, and Ministry of Culture and Information for the application of the new budgeting model. Ms. Sedej has helped the Serbian Public Policy Secretariat with designing an integrated planning system and methodology for medium-term institutional planning. She has also been engaged in USAID and UNDP-funded projects in Serbia and Tanzania that have supported private sector competitiveness, introduced new financial instruments, and engaged in public expenditure review. Ms. Sedej holds an MA in Economics and an MA in International Political Economy and Development from Fordham University, New York, and a BSc in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Novi Sad, Serbia.

RICHARD BARNEVELD, Financial Economic Affairs Department of the Ministry of Interior Affairs 

Richard Barneveld has been working with the Financial Economic Affairs Department of the Ministry of Interior Affairs since 2010. He is working on budget processes for many years in different positions, among others with the Ministry of Interior Affairs and the Ministry of Housing, Spatial Planning and Environment. He has been a trainer of the Dutch National Academy of Finance and Economics both in the Netherlands and at missions abroad.

LENA DE STIGTER, Advisor Good Financial Governance (Focus on GFG in Sectors and Inequality), Sector Program Good Financial Governance, GIZ, Germany

Lena De Stigter is an advisor at the German Development Cooperation (Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit – GIZ). She holds two Master Degrees in International Development from the University of Utrecht and the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands. Prior to joining GIZ, she has worked for Oxfam Novib, focusing on budget transparency and accountability in West Africa.

Ms. De Stigter has held several positions at GIZ. She was seconded to the Collaborative Africa Budget Reform Initiative (CABRI) in South Africa, where she worked as PFM advisor. She also coordinated the German support to the IMF Regional Technical Assistance Centers. Currently, she is working in the Good Financial Governance (GFG) team in the department Good Governance and Human Rights. Her focus topics are GFG in sector ministries, inequality and financial accountability.

Partners

This CEF learning initiative has been funded by the Dutch Ministry of Finance, and delivered with complementary financial support provided by the CEF.