Is Fiscal Policy the Answer?

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Public Investment Management Challenges and Tools

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future. At the same time, if the high levels of capital spending envisioned in an annual budget cannot be executed, they may be crowded out by other types of expenditures such as consumption/quick disbursing. 26. For example, Collier et al. (2009) suggest that, contingent on absorptive capacity, resource-rich countries invest more than the traditional permanent income hypothesis would suggest in order to lay the foundation for growth and diversification. 27. In addition to developing MTEFs and fiscal rules to promote enhanced public resource allocation over time, governments also have to make more explicit the possible risks to annual budget execution through fiscal risk statements (Everaert et al. 2009). Risks can have implications for the fiscal space for priority expenditures, including capital spending. The prevalence of underexecution of government investment spending, even when fiscal space is not the primary constraint, suggests that central finance agencies should pay more attention to potential bottlenecks in capital spending execution across implementing agencies. 28. But settings like China demonstrate the challenges of balancing responsiveness to infrastructure needs in typically urban growth poles versus those in more remote regions. These in turn pose particular challenges for sectoral and spatial public expenditure prioritization, including in forecasting mediumterm demand in areas such as transport, power, telecommunications, administrative infrastructure, education, and health care. 29. Examples include arrangements of postdisaster infrastructure rehabilitation, including “building back better” (Fengler, Ihsan, and Kaiser 2008). 30. The provision of PPP infrastructure may be particularly vulnerable to time inconsistency challenges and thus may deter either upstream investment or the effective operation and maintenance of this modality of public infrastructure provision. Because the average and marginal costs will diverge once assets have been put in place, ex post pressures by governments will effectively expropriate private investors by pushing them to operate assets at marginal cost or even below. 31. This requires public sector accounting to adequately reflect changes in the rates of depreciation of various public infrastructure asset classes, especially under the various operations and maintenance provisions (Hepworth 2003, 3). 32. Following the leadership of New Zealand, other examples are Australia, Canada, Colombia, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States (Khan and Mayes 2009, 2). 33. The OECD’s 2008 International Budget Practices and Procedures Database provides the last extensive survey on this issue (http://www.oecd.org/gov/ budget/database). 34. http://www.iniciativasepa.org/sepa_banco_mundial_mapa.asp.


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