Comparing Governments’
sector classifications
Sam Moon
ODI
How do countries plan budgets and
report on them?
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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