My latest op-ed was published in Monday's edition of the Myanmar Times. The article provides a brief summary of Myanmar's democratic and economic reforms as they relate to the country's management of their public finances. A summary of the article and a link to the full piece is provided below. Catalysing transition through public financial management reform By Giles Dickenson-Jones and Matthew Arnold Public financial management reforms are central to Myanmar’s entire transition. Improvements to social services like garbage collection, investment in new roads and bridges, and raising standards of health and education are all premised on the government being…
New Research Report: Intergovernmental Fiscal Relations in Myanmar
Another blog post and another research report focusing on Myanmar's taxation system: Intergovernmental Fiscal Relations in Myanmar: Current Processes and Future Priorities in Public Financial Management Reform This was my final research report developed at Myanmar's Centre for Economic and Social Development. The paper 'Intergovernmental Fiscal Relations in Myanmar' takes a look at how Myanmar's State, Region and Union governments relate to each other as part of budget and planning processes. Although it is targeted at a more general audience, it has been developed in the interest of providing greater clarity around the informal and formal processes that inform public…
Open Myanmar Initiative’s Budget Explorer Launched – Budget Data Visualization in R
Yet another quiet couple of months on the blogging front can be explained by me feverishly working on a number of projects as I reach my 2 year anniversary in Myanmar. The latest of these has been the launching of the Open Myanmar Initiative's Budget Dashboard, which is now available online here: http://mmbudgets.info/ The website, which I helped develop using the open-source R language and the free Shiny library provides the first user-friendly interface for exploring Myanmar's budgets both at the Union level and across all 14 States and Regions. Although there is still a long way to go before…
New Publication: A primer on subnational finances and fiscal decentralisation in Myanmar
For the few of you who might be interested in knowing more about how Myanmar's taxation system works outside of the union government, I've recently published a briefing note with a colleague on the topic. The note is available online here.
New Article Published – State and Region Public Finances in Myanmar
Hey all, So no doubt you would have all noticed I have been rather silent lately on the ye olde interweb. Although there is of course no excuse for this, it's predominantly a result of having been working rather intensely on a piece of research looking at Myanmar's public finance system: This paper focuses on understanding the role of state and region governments in relation to Myanmar's public finances. This has been done to take stock of existing research, better understand the composition of subnational finances, and attempt to address whether, at this point in the fiscal decentralization process, state and…
New Journal Article: Estimating the Global Costs of Violence
For those interested, I have just had another one of my pieces of research published. Those with access to ingentaconnect can access it by clicking here.
Problem Solving through ‘Bright Spots’
I was lucky enough to be invited to speak at a leadership conference about applying a ‘Bright Spots’ approach to tackling problems and have received a number of requests for further information around the idea. At the outset, I should make it clear to everyone that I unfortunately did not come up with this idea. Rather, the approach was popularized by Chip and Dan Heath in their book ‘Switch’. Solving Pumpkin-Related Problems In the book, Dan and Chip Heath describe a seemingly counterintuitive way of looking at problems which is centred on replicating success, rather than solving problems. Take my…