Ecorys has been involved in numerous projects providing support, advice and capacity building support to governments introducing output or performance based budgeting systems. We have worked at central, regional and local government levels in both Ministries of Finance and line Ministries.

Range of our activities

Our work has covered a range of activities, including:

• The design and development of output and performance based budget strategies
  
• Development of feasible and appropriate performance indicators
  
• Conducting public expenditure reviews
  
• Revising budget classification systems to facilitate collection and assessment of budget performance information
  
• Development of methodologies on performance measurement
  
• Integrating performance budgeting with the broader macroeconomic, development and social goals of the government
  
• Beneficiary analyses and integrating social and gender issues into the budgets
  
• Introducing new budgeting procedures for both current and capital expenditure
  
• Reforming and strengthening departmental institutional practices, linkages and reporting chains within the budget framework
  
• Reform of budget monitoring and evaluation systems to evaluate the effectiveness of public expenditure against key policy goals and other socio-economic evaluation criteria
  
• Introducing new managerial and operation systems to improve decision making for resource allocation
  
• Undertaking training needs analyses and developing training and capacity building programmes.

Our approach

A key element of our approach in our work is that we place great emphasis on ensuring the application of a number of key principles. For example, in all of our work to support the introduction and development of performance budgeting in developing countries, we seek to ensure that:

• Public budget systems and procedures are driven by economic policy and not vice versa
  
• Expenditure functions are linked within the wider macroeconomic framework
  
• All new systems introduced are sustainable and developed through a comprehensive review, needs assessment and planning phase
  
• There is consistency and compatibility between layers of Government decision making and accountability is decentralised to the appropriate level of Government
  
• The new performance budgeting systems can be supported by the existing or planned financial management and control systems