Results-oriented budgeting in Egypt

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Interdisciplinary Journal of Research in Business ISSN: 2046-7141
Vol. 2, Issue. 9, (pp.13- 25)
|
2013
11
 
Results-oriented budgeting in Egypt 
 
Medhat Hassanein
1

Professor of Finance, American University in Cairo (AUC) and Minister of Finance (MOF) 1999-2004, Egypt. 
Email: [e-mail]. 
 
Doha Abdelhamid 
Visiting Professor of Finance, Cape Breton University; Senior Policy Advisor at the Cabinet of Ministers, 
Egypt; and International Organization for Cooperation in Evaluation's (IOCE) Board Member. 
ABSTRACT 
Governments, either in the Eastern or Western hemispheres, are under increasing pressure to produce results 
that would lead to tangible outcomes for their citizens. The "Arab Spring" countries of the Middle East and 
North Africa (MENA) are under mounting pressure to undertake bolder reforms in public financial management 
and democratic governa
nce. Egypt’s story on its move towards public money and management results 
orientation is told in this paper by the former Minister of Finance and the former Director of the Fiscal Policy 
Advisory Group at the Ministry of Finance who orchestrated policy and program design and implementation 
with a set of major stakeholders. They expose evaluative knowledge and practice experienced through a 
synthesis of the successes, pitfalls, constraints and challenges faced during implementation, as well as the 
lessons learnt from the Egyptian model. By design, the steps followed lack the realization of its terminal, namely 
the effectuation of sustaining the results-oriented monitoring and evaluation in pilot ministries and replicating, 
using a whole-of-government approach. Contextual political interventions and reshuffled fiscal reform priorities 
are indispensable risks to policy, program and project continuity. On the upside, piloting activity is sustained 
informally despite the absence of an overarching government champion. The authors hope that fiscal necessity 
and popular pressures that resulted from the January 25
th
 , 2011 Revolution will dictate the revival of results-
orientation in public finance arena, as well as in other countries of the developed and developing worlds.