Sunday, March 16, 2008

World Bank talks to IMF

Daniel Kauffman of World Bank writes a comment on the IMF's PFM blog;

Your warm and kind welcome to my governance blog is much appreciated. Your blog is very useful to us, in fact. One area of potential synergy between both blogs relates to PFM databases. In that context, it may be of interest to the PFM and broader governance community to have your recommended list of empirical databases on PFM issues that permit cross-country comparisons, as well as those datasets that monitor and assess in-depth a country over time. For instance, do you provide access to the IMF's 'ROSC' Fiscal Transparency database? To the World Bank's PEFA database? Also in this context check out the relevant Open Budget Index (www.openbudgetindex.org) constructed by the International Budget Initiative NGO. Your assessment of the pros and cons (and what each one is best suited for)in each one of these and other such PFM empirical assessment databases would be very valuable to many, as well as having access to references to review articles evaluating these data initiatives.


It is heartening to see that IFIs are talking with each other across the blogs. I wonder weather World Bankers themselves read each other's blogs as much as they should. Let us hope that the World's most important development agency is not compartmentalized as it appears from the blogosphere.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

concur, it is a good thing that World Bank and IMF talk to each other transparently through blogs. Kaufmann already has interesting postings in his blog, and in his comment to the IMF that you pasted here he seems to ask them to disclose their data on transparency... Kaufmann with his colleagues have done so with their world governance indicators. may be the IMF will respond in kind?

Anonymous said...

Mr Kaufmann should know that PEFA is not a World Bank database but a multi-donor database and that data are publicly available at www.pefa.org with more than 30 reports so far directly accessible.