Public Investment Management (PIM)

Course details

Mid-to senior-level officials at ministries of Finance, Planning or Finance units at sector ministries, and Supreme Audit Institutions.

Qualification:
Participants should be involved in budget preparation, monitoring, or evaluation at the central, line ministry, or agency level.

Language:
The course is conducted in English with simultaneous interpretation into Arabic.

Course Description:
The course, presented by the World Bank’s Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Network (PREM), provides analytical tools and techniques that can be used in Public Investment Management (PIM). It exposes participants to tools for diagnostic and performance improvement of the capital or development budgets in Arab countries.

As the economic challenges of Arab economies increase, there will be a need for greater integration of capital projects to ensure overall coherence with development strategies. Furthermore, shortcomings in the management of public investment have become a source of increasing public concern in these countries, through issues ranging from continued congestion or capacity constraints and visible delays in the completion of major projects, to the transparency and accountability of the underlying processes.

Public Investment Management (PIM) is an increasingly active sub-theme within the Bank-Fund agenda on public sector governance and public financial management. The key feature of PIM is to build on the substantial diagnostic tools that the Bank and Fund have already developed for public expenditure to conduct specialized diagnostics and responses focused specifically on the capital component of the budget. Thus PIM calls on capacities that are already in place through instruments such as public expenditure reviews (PERs) and the public expenditure and financial accountability assessment (PEFA) to provide countries with ways of improving the project cycle within their overall budgetary management frameworks.

A PIM diagnostic typically involves scrutiny of government procedures for

1. investment guidance, project development, and preliminary screening;
2. formal project appraisal;
3. independent review of appraisal;
4. project selection and budgeting;
5. project implementation;
6. project adjustment;
7. facility operation; and
8. project evaluation.

This diagnostic is undertaken by looking at the guidance documents, processes, and specific cases through the project cycle, assessed against a set of minimum criteria for an effective project cycle. The result of the diagnostic then guides the recommendations for reforms to address the identified deficiencies, ensuring better use of scarce budget resources and more effective delivery and operation of capital projects.