This training activity will be delivered as part of the Strategic Planning and Budgeting (SPB) project, funded by the European Union. The overall objective of the project is to contribute to strengthening of beneficiary countries’ capacity to design and implement medium-term macro-fiscal policy.
What you will learn
The Workshop will build on policy coordination issues identified within the CEF’s Fiscal Impact Assessment of Structural Reforms project.[1] In this project, beneficiaries from South East Europe (SEE) discussed country case studies on how fiscal costs of structural reforms are integrated into countries’ annual budgets and medium-term fiscal documents.
A number of deficiencies have been observed in the integration of structural reforms’ fiscal costs into medium-term fiscal programming documents, and the case studies provide a means to gauge these across the SEE region and explore how they can be addressed. Challenges in policy coordination include inconsistent procedures, unclear responsibilities or lines of authority, inadequate coordination mechanisms, communication problems, and inconsistencies between central and local government levels. Overcoming such deficiencies should help promote the success of structural reforms through better transparency, accountability, and prioritization of efforts.
A comprehensive strategic planning process involves a wide range of relevant stakeholders providing input at various stages. The Workshop focuses on strategic planning and on integration of structural reforms into medium-term fiscal documents. This will contribute to a better understanding of the roles of line ministries, the Ministry of Finance and the Government in the planning process and of the key topics for EU surveillance in these areas.
How you will benefit
The workshop’s primary objective is to enhance fiscal policy coordination of structural reforms among ministries, and to enhance the capacity of ministries of finance to carry out the coordination task. It aims to promote:
- identification of the key stakeholders in coordinating fiscal policies
- mutual understanding of strategic planning and budgeting processes
- integration of procedures to prepare the annual budget and strategic documents
- a shared sense of urgency to overcome ambiguous responsibilities and reconcile different interests
- a dialogue on strategies to assure budget compliance
- application of adequate monitoring and evaluation measures
- exchange of good policy coordination practices (e.g., working groups and focal points)
- transparency and better information flows among stakeholders
Who should attend
The workshop has been designed primarily for mid-to-senior level officials working at MoFs (and other coordinating institutions) who integrate the input from budget institutions on structural reforms into the annual budget and strategic macro-fiscal documents (e.g., the intermediate and final authors of EFP/PEP reports).
Mid-to-senior level officials working in line ministries (and other budget users) who provide such input (e.g., program managers, planning and financing experts, and heads of relevant departments responding to MoF requests) are also kindly invited to attend the workshop.
Your contributions
The workshop will be highly participatory. Participants are encouraged to be active in discussions and exercises throughout the three days. As part of knowledge exchange, they will have to present their countries’ fiscal policy coordination process, i.e. the most relevant institutions and procedures, indicating recent improvements, problems, and best practice.
[1] Cases studies and conclusions from this project have been published; the e-book can be downloaded here.
Faculty
MOJMIR MRAK, Professor of International Finance, University of Ljubljana, and CEF Associate Fellow
Mojmir 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. Professor Mrak is author of numerous books and articles.
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 the first five years following independence in 1991, he was the chief external debt negotiator of Slovenia. In addition, he was responsible for the early credit arrangements of Slovenia with the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the World Bank. Between 1998 and 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 the financial package of Slovenia’s accession. Between 2003 and early 2006, he coordinated the Slovene government’s activities with respect to the 2007-2013 financial perspective of the EU, and is currently involved in negotiations about the 2014-2020 financial perspective of the EU.
Mr. Mrak has served as a consultant to numerous international organizations and several governments in South East Europe. He is a CEF Associate Fellow.
DIRK-JAN KRAAN, Public Financial Management Advisor for South East Europe of the IMF
Dirk-Jan Kraan is a Dutch citizen. He holds MA degrees in Law (1970) and Economics (1976) from Erasmus University in Rotterdam and a PhD degree in Economics from the same university (1989). He worked in several positions in the Directorate General of the Budget of the Dutch Ministry of Finance from 1980 to 2002, lately as head of the Division of Policy Review of the Inspectorate of Finance (Expenditure Division).
Mr. Kraan joined the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (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 recently joined the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to work as a Regional Public Financial Management Advisor for South East Europe based at the CEF in Ljubljana, Slovenia.
TAŞKIN BABAOĞLAN, Planning Expert, Ministry of Development, Turkey
Taşkın Babaoğlan igraduated from the Department of Political Science and Public Administration of the Faculty of Political Science at the University of Ankara. He holds an MA in international political economy from Claremont Graduate University.
Mr. Babaoğlan has served as a Planning Expert for the Turkish Ministry of Development since 2001. He deals with local government finance, public sector finance, policy analysis and strategic planning, public internal control, and internal auditing.
TIJANA STANKOVIĆ, Advisor to Vice Prime Minister for Economic Policy and Financial System, Montenegro
Tijana Stanković graduated from the Faculty of Economics in Podgorica, Montenegro, in 1999. She completed postgraduate studies on the Entrepreneurial Economy in 2002 and obtained a master’s in pension system capitalization in 2004.
Between 1999 and 2011, she worked for the Privatization Council, the Institute for Strategic Studies and Prognoses, the World Bank, and the government of Montenegro in advising, research, and management functions. In 2011-2013, she has been Deputy Minister of Finance, responsible for the Sector of Economy Policy and Development. Among other tasks, the sector prepares macroeconomic and fiscal revenue projections as well as all analytical documents needed either in annual budget preparation or for medium-term programming documents, including Montenegro’s Pre-accession Economic Programme. Since 2013, she has been Advisor to the Vice Prime Minister for Economic Policy and Financial System of Montenegro.
She is a member of special United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) teams for Public Private Partnerships, Innovation, and Competitiveness Policies; the Intergovernmental Committee on Economic Cooperation of Montenegro and China; and the Economists Association of Montenegro. She has taken part in a numerous economic and scientific conferences and study visits, and has published scientific working papers (both nationally and internationally) on economic policy design and analysis.
BERT HOF, Senior Researcher, Competition & Regulation Department, SEO Economic Research, The Netherlands
Social benefits and costs and the role of government are recurring themes in the research by Bert Hof. As of January 2012, his research activities include competition and regulation issues as well.
Bert Hof is senior researcher in the Competition and Regulation cluster of SEO Economic Research. Recent projects include evaluating the Dutch corporate governance code, developing methods to evaluate space investments, developing methods to evaluate investments in electricity interconnections, valued added of the electricity sector and the consumer power of buyers of newly built houses.
In the period 2003-2009, Mr. Hof worked at SEO Economic Research as well, as a researcher in the Transport and Regions cluster and later in the Labour & Education cluster. During that period he worked on social cost-benefit analyses (SCBAs) in the areas of transportation and land use investments and in areas such as digitization of audiovisual materials. Examples of other research are comparing models that calculate the effects of transport investments on the rest of the economy and assessing the usefulness and necessity of state interventions in the housing market.
During 2009-2011, Mr. Hof worked at the Dutch Ministry of Finance, amongst others supervising and assessing SCBAs, working on the discount rate to be applied in Dutch SCBAs and on the theory and practical use of the instrument SCBA.
In short, Mr. Hof has an extensive knowledge of and experience with social cost-benefit analyses. He considers issues from a welfare economic perspective, focusing on the role of government without losing sight of practical matters in the application of economic theory and evidence.
Application procedure
Application Closing Date: Mar 9,2014
*For the SPB project the costs of 2 selected participants per beneficiary country are covered by the EU funding.
