Public Financial Management: From Good to Great

Abstract This chapter builds a case for improving India’s public financial management systems, with an eye towards an on-demand architecture that provides stakeholders with information to better link fiscal inputs and outputs with policy outcomes. To achieve these goals, we forward three key principals. One, programmatic and fiscal events ought to be coupled so that each granular transaction is connected to a particular activity. Two, these types of events ought to be co-ordinated such that a programmatic activity, when completed and recorded, triggers a fiscal event. Three, programmatic and fiscal data ought to be recorded at the granular level, close to real-time of when the event happens. We then discuss properties of the overall PFM system to support these architectural shifts.