DUSAHNBE, March 14, 2016, Asia-Plus — The EU technical assistance project, Support to Selected Areas of PFM Reforms, has successfully conducted a workshop on “Investment Budgeting: the Current Situation, Challenges and Objectives; Macroeconomic Database” in close cooperation with the Ministry of Finance of Tajikistan.
According the Delegation of the European Union to Tajikistan, more than 40 managers and specialists of budget and policy departments of the ministries of Tajikistan, National Bank of Tajikistan, as well as representatives of the Finance and Economic Institute of Tajikistan participated in the workshop.
Participants reportedly discussed a number of issues related to investment budgeting, and formation of a macroeconomic database. In particular, presentations were made on the following topics: capital projects assessment tools; review of the formation and execution of the state budget for capital construction; investment projects evaluation process in the European Union; development of the macroeconomic database; and development of the macroeconomic framework.
The Project team addressed questions related to the current process of formation and execution of the state budget for capital expenditures and existing bottlenecks, made recommendations for improving the system, offered tools for evaluating capital expenditures in the preliminary stage of the investment cycle and examples from international best practices. Within the framework of the implementation of macroeconomic policies, the importance of balanced cross-sectoral indicators to be used in the future to predict the macroeconomic indicators were highlighted. Furthermore, it was indicated that as part of this activity it is expected to develop a unified macroeconomic database.
The participants expressed their interest in specific issues related to the selection and evaluation of investment projects, ways to improve and simplify procedures. Regarding the mechanisms for effective regulation and details of the country”s balance of payments, Agency of Statistics under President of Tajikistan recommended to use a common methodology for the calculation of macroeconomic indicators for all participants in the process.
The EU project will continue to support and provide technical assistance to develop investment budgeting system and macroeconomic database, as well as to update the regulatory framework and to support the Ministry of Finance of Tajikistan in achieving the goals of PFM Strategy (2015-2018).
