ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the international experience in public financial management (PFM) reform and assesses the approaches to be taken to improve PFM, in light of the governance and institutional context of each country. A side of the experience coin is positive: PFM reforms have been successful in cases when they were carefully suited to the country's governance, economic, institutional and cultural context. The Public Expenditure and Financial Accountability (PEFA) assessments have thus become the starting point for discussion of reform programs, and the dataset is helpful to researchers worldwide. For three decades loans and technical assistance have been provided to improve PFM and since the 1990s PFM reforms were incorporated in policy programs supported by external aid. Regrettably, accountability for the quality of technical assistance in PFM has been weak to non-existent in donor agencies, and advice provided by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is too often of the cookie-cutting sort.
