Handbook

Public financial management (PFM) is an ‘applied’ discipline, and one that is international in scope. It covers a range of resource management practices that underpin policy-making in contemporary government, including fiscal rules to guide government spending and borrowing, multi-year expenditure frameworks that capture the longer term impacts of current policy decisions, and performance-based budgeting to inform the level and relative priority of funding allocations. PFM practices permeate the information and systems that govern the everyday decision-making of public managers, and all of them operate at the messy intersection between bureaucratic processes and evidence, and political imperatives and risk. In this course you will get to grips with these practical realities. You will be equipped with key conceptual and practical knowledge to integrate financial and non-financial performance in the public sector, and how to apply it to generate public value. Using interactive teaching approaches you will learn from senior PFM practitioners and acquire skills to critically appraise the key institutions and practices that manage and account for public resources and public policies.