Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 19th NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview Fiscal Policy Author(s) Elena Tselishcheva The Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration Ekaterinburg Russian Federation Malutina Larisa Title Effectiveness of public expenditures as a new challenge of fiscal policy File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Abstract This paper will be a continuation of the work on OSI/LGI international research project ‘The Impact of the Economic Downturn on Local Government”. First of all we want to present the results of analysis of the crisis impact on all tiers of RF budgetary system, paying special attention to revenues and expenditures assignment in crisis and post-crisis period. Then we are going to present more detailed analysis of local government revenues and expenditures dynamics and its structure. In recession and post recession period local governments had faced with serious budget problems, which were related both to revenues reducing and to necessity to increase expenditures to provide support. On the base of analysis of local budget expenditures structure we are going to present changes in municipal social and economic policy priorities. We will show how local governments in Russian Federation could participate in anti recession and post-recession policy. The crisis period showed that the main problem in situation when revenues decreasing was how to cut expenditures or/and how to increase its effectiveness. This problem is not related only to the crisis period because of the fact that at there is a constant problem of lack of recourses at the local level of government. In future local governments will be facing with the necessity to increase expenditures due to the increasing of elder population, decreasing of revenues will be possible also due to this reason. Economic and social distress may lead to wider threats to municipal budgets. The crisis just showed that the main problem today is effectiveness of budget expenditures. We need new approaches to increase orientation at results in Fiscal Policy. The recession was a good lesson. In our paper we are going to rise a question which actions and innovations of local governments used in the recession period could be appropriate in future. Measures related to the effectiveness of budgets are very variable. We have analyzed antirecession programs of municipalities in Urals region. And from these programs we can take some good examples: - improvement of service quality; - implementing of service quality standards; - wide using of municipal contracts and outsourcing; - fighting with corruption, making authorities more responsible for cost decisions; - resource saving investments; - optimization of amount of municipal enterprises - and others. In case-study part of the paper will be some examples of how local governments in RF (Ural region) try to get more result from expenditures. As the Fiscal Policy Working Group will be a two year project we want to continue our research on problem of public expenditures effectiveness problem. The main objective of future research paper is to analyze the problem of effectiveness of local budget expenditures and to suggest recommendations. And the questions closely related to the objective are follows: What is the effectiveness of budget expenditures Which approaches are exist to evaluate effectiveness Which methods allow to increase effectiveness of local budget expenditures (in theory and in practice (both Russian and abroad)) Which policy recommendations can be used in Russian Fiscal Policy
