The topic of the WG is public finance, which plays a vital role in providing essential public services and goods. The WG deals with financial management of existing resources, which includes both microeconomic and macroeconomic dimensions and whose effectiveness is critical for the creation of an enabling environment at all levels for sustainable development.

While the extent of transparency and budgetary innovations is long recognised as a factor influencing the quality of public finance management, research in this area in the NISPAcee region is quite scarce. On the other hand, we have huge anecdotic evidence that meaningful changes take place and innovative practices are introduced. In order to fill this gap, the WG announces these topics for the 2022 annual conference:

At the same time we acknowledge the uniqueness of the experience with the Covid-19 pandemic and call for research of both the micro and macroeconomic aspects of the adopted measures and evaluation of their fiscal impacts.

In order to address this challenge, the WG announces these topics for the 2022 annual conference:

1)     Local government budget transparency, which addresses research regarding the regulation of budget transparency and its development, extent of compulsory versus voluntary budget information disclosure, and measurement and evaluation of budget transparency or search for determinants of budget transparency.

2)     Budgetary innovations at both state and local government levels, including the introduction of fiscal councils, multi-annual financial frameworks, and performance based budgeting etc.

3)     Public finance for sustainable development in the post Covid-19 pandemic era, which includes, amongst others, promoting sound economic, social and environmental policies; ensuring fairness, efficiency and effectiveness of tax systems; strengthening national oversight mechanisms or building the technical, financial and technological capacity of public authorities.

The aim of the working group is to build a network of scholars, active in the area of public finance and public financial management, and to support the publication of original research undertaken in the NISPAcee region, including the special assistance of WG coordinators to young scholars with limited research and publishing experience. The expected outcome is a special journal issue on government responses to the Covid-19 pandemic in the NISPAcee region and publication of outstanding papers on public finance for sustainable development in the NISPAcee Journal.

The authors are invited to submit original research papers, i.e. papers presenting the results of their own research. We especially welcome empirical papers providing concrete data and their analysis. The form of the papers is quite open, e.g. single or multiple case studies, comparative papers, survey results or papers applying some statistical analysis.

Requirements for paper submission

Structure of the proposed abstract:

·       The objective or the research question(s).

·       Data and methodology.

·       Expected findings.

The standard structure of the paper:

·       Introduction, which clearly states the objectives of the paper.

·       Description of the problem studied, showing a good knowledge of the relevant literature in both the local language and in English.

·       Short introduction of the country or countries, i.e. present all information necessary (and relevant) to understand your paper.

·       Data and methodology described in detail.

·       Analysis of the problem.

·       Evaluation and policy implications.

·       Conclusions and recommendations (this part needs to result from the previous parts of the paper).

From participants of this working group extended abstract (5-10 pages) with brief introduction, methodology, preliminary results and conclusion is required before the conference.
Deadline of full paper submission is 20^th of May 2022.

You can find manuscript guidelines on THIS LINK.