Nutrition investments affect human capital formation, which in turn affects economic growth. Malnutrition is intrinsically connected to human capital—undernutrition contributes to nearly half of child mortality, and stunting reduces productivity and earnings in adulthood. Improving nutrition requires a multisectoral effort, but it is difficult to identify and quantify the basic financing parameters as used in traditional sectors. What is being spent and by whom and on what? To address these questions, nutrition public expenditure reviews (NPERs) determine the level of a country’s overall nutrition public spending and assess whether its expenditure profile will enable the country to realize its nutrition goals and objectives. When done well, NPERs go beyond simply quantifying how much is spent on nutrition; they measure how well money is being spent to achieve nutrition outcomes and identify specific recommendations for improvement. A Guiding Framework for Nutrition Public Expenditure Reviews presents the key elements of an NPER and offers guidance, practical steps, and examples for carrying out an NPER. The book draws upon good practices from past NPERs as well as common practices and expertise from public expenditure reviews in other sectors. This handbook is intended for practitioners who are tasked with carrying out NPERs. Other target audiences include country nutrition policy makers, development partner officials, government technical staff, and nutrition advocates. The book presents data and analytical challenges faced by previous NPER teams and lays out the kinds of analyses that past NPERs have been able to carry out and those that they were unable to perform because of data or capacity constraints. It concludes with further work needed at the global and country levels to create the conditions necessary to conduct more comprehensive NPERs.

World Bank Discussion Paper No. 318. Analyzes the condition needed for achieving sustainable private sector growth in the Visegrad countries--the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and the Slovak Republic. The analysis focuses on the legal and regulatory framework and institutional capacity, the privatization of state enterprises, and private sector development.

Agricultural mechanization in Africa south of the Sahara — especially for small farms and businesses — requires a new paradigm to meet the needs of the continent’s evolving farming systems. Can Asia, with its recent success in adopting mechanization, offer a model for Africa? An Evolving Paradigm of Agricultural Mechanization Development analyzes the experiences of eight Asian and five African countries. The authors explore crucial government roles in boosting and supporting mechanization, from import policies to promotion policies to public good policies. Potential approaches presented to facilitating mechanization in Africa include prioritizing market-led hiring services, eliminating distortions, and developing appropriate technologies for the African context. The role of agricultural mechanization within overall agricultural and rural transformation strategies in Africa is also discussed. The book’s recommendations and insights should be useful to national policymakers and the development community, who can adapt this knowledge to local contexts and use it as a foundation for further research.

This paper examines whether the consensus reached by the late 2000s among African Union member countries and their external partners on the need to reverse the decades-long decline in spending for essential public goods and services in agriculture has begun to result inimproved levels and quality of national expenditure programs for the sector. It synthesizes evidence from 20 Agriculture Public Expenditure Reviews (Ag PERs) that have been carried out in countries in Africa South of the Saharan (Botswana, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana, Guinea, Liberia, Madagascar, Mozambique, Rwanda, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Tanzania, Togo, Uganda, and Zambia) with World Bank assistance during 2009–2015. This synthesis focuses on several measures: (1) the level of expenditures on agriculture, with particular reference to the explicit target by African heads of state in the 2003 Maputo Declaration on Agriculture and Food Security (reconfirmed in the Malabo Declaration) to allocate 10 percent of national budgets to the sector; (2) the composition and priorities of expenditures with respect to stated national strategies, evidence of impact, and sustainability; and (3) budget planning and implementation that aims to strengthen public financial management in general, and budget coherence, outputs, outcomes, and supporting mechanisms, such as procurement and audit, in particular. This paper uses Ag PERs to analyze budgetary trends across countries, identifies major expenditure issues, and synthesizes lessons regarding spending efficiency. The analysis results in evidence-based recommendations that address, inter alia, budget planning, budget execution, and monitoring for accountability; the creation of a reliable database; more effective intra-and intersectoral coordination; and the cost-effectiveness of different spending policies for meeting various objectives

"Burundi has made tremendous progress over the past few years, including: the approval of the new Constitution in 2005, emphasizing the principles of power sharing and local development; the successful management of two rounds of democratic elections in 2005 and 2010’; and the creation of stable macroeconomic environment, which encouraged rebuilding of core public sector institutions. Despite these achievements, the report notes that economic growth remains weak and GSP rates are below expectations. Burundi is therefore vulnerable to different sources of risks conspiring to create a ‘fragility trap’ into which the economy can fall. Chief amongst them are: (i) food price volatility linked to international markets and climatic conditions: (ii) oil prices that affect the import bill of the country; (iii) high level of dependency on aid inflows; (iv) low budget execution capacity, coupled with weak state effectiveness and under-performing public institutions; (v) constraints on productive activity and a highly concentrated export profile; and (vi) enduring risks of political and social instability linked to the return of refugees and its impact on land conflicts and security threats. In this context, the main objectives of this Public Expenditure Review is to assist the Government in its efforts to escape fragility by focusing on two important and complementary themes: (i) creating adequate fiscal space to reduce the impact of future shocks; and (ii) using the available fiscal space to improve public expenditure management and promote government effectiveness. Building on these topics, the report emphasizes six key messages : (i) Burundi has a narrow fiscal space given the structure of its public expenditures, composed mainly of salaries and transfers; (ii) the country should mobilize additional domestic revenues to increase its fiscal space; (iii) the role of donors in supporting effective management of public expenditures remain critical and can also be the source of additional fiscal stress, especially when budget support arrives late in a fiscal year; (iv) accessing high quality budget data remains a challenge due to major incoherencies between data from the Treasury database and data published by SIGEFI; (v) the aid management is not properly integrated into budget execution process; (vi) it is advisable to adopt realistic and pragmatic solutions to improve the performance of the public administration, while keeping the wage bill under control. "