134 EL SALVADOR
establish annual goals for goods and services, and there are no management contracts signed by both the authorities and the ministerial operative units. Moreover, staff assessment systems designed to promote achievement of institutional results have yet to be created. Some ministries develop initiatives to improve their service quality, but there are no institutionalized strategies, and no ministry actively seeks customer opinions regarding goods and services. All ministries have information systems, but the quality, coverage and appropriateness of the data are limited. Monitoring and Evaluation The Senplades is responsible for monitoring the medium-term national plan; however, there is still no system in place to consolidate all the necessary information to monitor the plan’s objectives and goals and that would provide periodical analysis through performance indicators. The Senplades is also the entity responsible for evaluation of government management, but its evaluative capacity is weak since it is still at the formative stage. With regard to data availability, the country has statistical information systems for economic data that is provided by the National Statistics Institute and the central bank, and social data from the National Statistics Institute. Conclusions This assessment reveals that Ecuador should focus its attention on i) developing a monitoring and evaluation system that establishes whether or not the government plan’s objectives and goals have been achieved, ii) analyzing the quality of public expenditures, iii) building a medium-term fiscal framework that establishes firmer bases for operative planning and iv) improving its policies and instruments for fiscal discipline. These improvements would lay the foundations for progress toward implementing results-based budgeting.
El Salvador PES Executive Summary (2010) The development of El Salvador’s institutional capacities is the fruit of a long modernization process that got underway in the 1990s after the civil war that had destroyed the economy and the national institutions. Since that time, the country has gradually been increasing its capacity to manage the public