Comparing Governments’ sector classifications

Sam MoonODI

How do countries plan budgets and report on them?

• Financial year• Source revenue• Identify strategic priorities• Fund institutions to implement• Report on expenditure and activities• Evaluate delivery

• Strategic priorities are usually organised by sector, comprised of the membership of a number of institutions.

• The composition of sectors and structure of institutions varies very widely across countries

• BUT whatever the organisation, at a lower level these institutions deliver against a number of functions that are relatively comparable across countries.

• COFOG attempts to model this• DAC/CRS actually models aid funding rather

than government functions, but in reality does coincide to a large extent with the low level functions that government delivers against

• So we looked at the institutional and sectoral structures of the domains of education, health and ‘justice law and order’ in 14 countries.

• We compared these countries against CRS and COFOG to see if there are similarities between countries at functional level, and how well these standards describe this organisation.

• Education – – fairly good alignment across countries and with

CRS. – structure is similar, approach to education tends

not to controversial. – Government dominates, but often with heavy

donor support.

• Health– Turned out as extremely difficult to model. – As a sector definition, not generally controversial– But widely different approaches by countries– Heavy donor involvement, and often by vertical

funds to specific areas rather than a sector wide approach

– Can be quite political.– Could not propose a commonality.

• Justice Law and Order– Sector definitions are very variant across countries– At the high level (ministry) institutional structure

also varies fairly widely– But the functions are remarkably similar– There tends to be similarity between departments

and agencies in the sector regardless of their location in ministries or sectors.

– (everyone has police, prisons, courts etc.)

• So this analysis was useful• We extended the methodology to all domains

that government operates in• And also added the domain of development

partner administration

• In all domains but health we are able to propose a list of functions that is recognisable in the country budget structures

• These functions are notionally grouped in domains, for organisational purposes

• To a broad extent, this can be rolled up to the DAC/CRS standard as well.

Further Issues and next steps.

• Testing against more countries will allow the definitions to evolve

• The low level institutional composition of countries is often very hard to obtain – and changes often– e.g in Malawi the Environment Affairs Department

has existed in the same form for 20 years, but it has been relocated within different ministries 7 times in that time.

• A key institutional breakdown that needs further work is the local government role– Service delivery is often undertaken by a local

authority, but this varies widely by country, but is well defined at country level.

– A reduced set of functions common at local government level is a possible approach, but the identification of whether a function is undertaken at central or local level will always require country level

• Response:– Clear about: • nobody is suggesting that governments should change

their classifications.• Has to be possible to take information from IATI and

match it against the government