The Impact of New Technologies in Public Financial Management and Performance: Agenda for Public Financial Management Reformance in the Context of Global Best Practices (0812.1218v1)

Abstract: Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) has practically penetrated into all spheres of life. Therefore a closer look at the impact of ICT in public financial management and performance is highly justified. Public finance is defined as a field of economics concerned with paying for collective or governmental activities, and with the administration and design of those activities. Activities will be viewed as services or more precisely as public services. We believe that there is need to consider performance from the perspective of effective performance and the perceived performance. In fact the real or effective performance might not correspond to the perceived performance. A service can be considered from the perspective of the decision-maker, who in our case could be a government or a collectivity. ICT can be employed in the three phases that concern the decision-maker: design, implementation and evaluation. The beneficiaries of a service can employ ICT in any of the three phases - awareness, exploitation and assessment - for guarantying a high level of efficiency. Each phase in the environment of a service will be presented as well as illustrations of how ICT can be employed in order to improve the end-result of each one of them. We believe that a high efficiency of each phase will produce a high global efficiency. It should be noted however that the effectiveness of any system is highly dependent on the human engagement in the system. Therefore, the impact of ICT in public financial management will be felt only if the decision-makers and the end-users of the services engage themselves in the success of the system. Instead of giving a catalog of services, the focus has been on the model (or methodology) to adopt in designing services for which ICT could enhance the implementation.