Public Sector Governance and Accountability Series: Budgeting and ...

11
What Would an Ideal Public
Finance Management
System Look Like?
matthew andrews
I
n their 2006 meetings, the finance ministers of the Group of Eight
(G8) came out in support of elaborating a public finance management
(PFM) code—a document described by the minister of
the Russian Federation as one that “should make people understand
how the financial policy priorities are chosen and how the finance
management is arranged” (RosBusinessConsulting 2006). Such a
code, the minister added, would provide a standardized approach
to thinking about what PFM processes look like (or should
look like), covering “public finance management spheres” including
policy development and financing, “fiscal transparency, measures
securing finance stability, and result-oriented budgeting”
(RosBusinessConsulting 2006).
The donor community can certainly claim to have preempted
this call, having already created a tool to standardize thinking about
PFM process quality: the Public Expenditure and Financial
Accountability (PEFA) indicators. The “PFM Performance Measurement
Framework is an integrated monitoring framework that
allows measurement of country PFM performance over time”
(PEFA 2006: ii). Introduced to help “assess and develop essential
PFM systems,”it is meant to provide “a common pool of information
359