Policy

Much of my policy engagement has been based on my book and articles about the role of parliaments in the budgetary process, including my index of legislative budget institutions. [book] [journal] [chapter] [spanish]

I have given evidence to committees in several parliaments on how to strengthen financial scrutiny, including the German Bundestag, the Canadian House of Commons, the UK House of Commons, the South African Parliament, the Welsh National Assembly, the Scottish Parliament, the Parliament of Estonia, among others. In 2023, the OECD Best Practices for Parliaments in Budgeting cited my book as among the “seminal pieces that helped inform this work” including aspects such as the design of budget amendment powers and the committee process for financial scrutiny. [citation]

More generally, I support efforts to improve transparency and accountability in public finances. Other examples of my work in this area include:

Background paper on fiscal openness for the Open Government Partnership’s 2022 Skeptic’s Guide to Open Government [with Martin Haus and Paolo de Renzio]. [guide] This is an update of earlier work with Paolo de Renzio on the impacts of fiscal openness prepared for the Global Initiative for Fiscal Transparency and published by the World Bank. [journal]

‘Principles for Independent Fiscal Institutions and Case Studies’, OECD Journal on Budgeting 15:2 (special issue, 2016) [with Lisa von Trapp and Ian Lienert]. [journal]

Contributor for the United Kingdom to the Open Budget Index 2006, 2008, 2010, 2012, 2015, and 2017. [website]

Contributor to nine OECD budget reviews: Romania (2004), Slovenia (2004), Croatia (2005), Greece (2007), Estonia (2008), Bulgaria (2009), Latvia (2009), Lithuania (2010), and Luxembourg (2011).

For more information, see my CV here.