Georgia

Supreme audit institutions (SAIs) are a critical part of public accountability systems. They ‘watch’ over governments’ use of public money and report about it publicly, helping to increase transparency. SAIs have an interest in strongly engaging with external stakeholders – including citizens – to make sure that their work is relevant, understood and used to hold governments to account. This paper provides a compilation of European SAIs’ practices on communication, co-operation and collaboration with external partners and is intended to provide inspiration to SAIs of EU candidate countries and potential candidates to further strengthen their engagement with their non-governmental stakeholders.

The institutions that make up the centre of government (CoG) play a crucial role in the policymaking process and help to ensure that government decisions are timely, evidence-informed, strategic and consistent. Despite this prominent role, the CoG often has the reputation of being somewhat opaque in terms of its structure and ways of working. This report presents an overview of the role and functions of the CoG of five European Neighbourhood Policy East countries – Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, the Republic of Moldova and Ukraine – from a comparative perspective, both with respect to each other and in comparison with CoGs in OECD and EU countries. The report explores the CoG’s role in policy co-ordination, how it supports quality decision making, its contribution to strategic planning and its role in managing European integration issues. The report highlights strengths and challenges in the ways that the CoG institutions operate in the five countries and suggests areas for which policy dialogue and exchange of experience with OECD and EU Members could help to enhance outcomes.

This report discusses the costs and benefits of the transition from cash to accrual accounting in the public sector for SIGMA partners in the Western Balkans and the European Neighbourhood. The countries are attracted by the promises of accrual accounting and the corresponding IPSAS standards that it will improve transparency, accountability and financial decision-making. This report investigates whether the reform towards accrual accounting is indeed recommendable given that the reform towards IPSAS-based financial statements also carries a higher administrative burden and often requires government-wide adaptation or adjustment of the financial information systems. In this report, evidence from case studies of five EU Member States and four SIGMA partners is combined with a review of the academic literature to understand the balance of the benefits versus the costs of the reform.

European Neighbourhood East countries have been actively engaged in improving service delivery for citizens and businesses for some time. Some have opted for flagship initiatives (often with large-scale, one-stop shop solutions), some for digitalisation of services, while some have taken an incremental approach towards the service delivery modernisation process. This comparative paper outlines the state of play in the design and delivery of public administrative services in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine. Public administrative services cover the vast array of interactions with (and within) government: making enquiries, applications, registrations and payments, and receiving information, documentation, decisions and funds. These contacts allow service users (citizens, businesses and non-governmental organisations) to exercise rights, access entitlements, execute obligations and achieve ambitions. As well as the description and analysis of the general service delivery framework(s), institutional set-up and practical implementation, this paper presents a comparative analysis of a set of life events and highlights inspiring practices from the different countries.

Good governance of public agencies requires the application of a set of regulatory and managerial tools to find the right balance between autonomy of agencies and adequate oversight from portfolio ministries and other actors. This paper provides insights from EU and OECD good practices, with a detailed analysis of EU acquis requirements for national regulatory agencies. New empirical evidence shows that public administrations in the Western Balkans and European Neighbourhood area lack clear policies and regulations for agency governance and misinterpret the EU acquis. This leads to a proliferation of agencies, duplication of functions and waste of public resources, a lack of accountability to portfolio ministries and generally a governance vacuum. Implementation of government policy is blocked and democratic accountability generally undermined. Finally, recommendations for better organisation of public administration are provided, based on the empirical analysis and lessons learned from SIGMA's engagement in such reforms.

Georgia has made remarkable progress in expanding education access and improving education quality. Nevertheless, the majority of children in Georgia leave school without mastering the basic competencies for life and work. Moreover, students’ background is becoming a greater influence on their achievement. This review, developed in partnership with UNICEF, provides Georgia with recommendations to strengthen its evaluation and assessment system to focus on helping students learn. It will be of interest to countries that wish to strengthen their own evaluation and assessment systems and, in turn, improve educational outcomes.

This study assesses the use of economic instruments for water resources management in Georgia and considers options for reform following the 2014 signature of an Association Agreement with the EU committing to alignment with the EU’s Water Framework Directive. This includes the systematic use of economic instruments, including water pricing, to recover the cost of water services provided to households, industry and farmers, among other measures. Three main economic instruments are recommended in this study: 1) the introduction of a licensing regime and charges for both surface water and groundwater abstraction, 2) the restoration of a licencing and charging regime for all forms of water pollution, and 3) more rigorous enforcement of these measures, including more active monitoring and higher fines for offenders. Implementing these measures will be greatly facilitated by the enactment of the new Water Law now being examined by the government of Georgia.

This report discusses key issues surrounding finance mobilisation for achieving Georgia’s climate change and green growth targets, and new investment opportunities for developing its capital market. The report focuses particularly on finance for climate change mitigation from various sources – private and public, national and international – but remains relevant for other issues around the country’s green growth agenda, such as energy productivity, air pollution prevention, climate change adaptation, better waste management, conservation of natural resources, and the technologies and innovations that help tackle these issues.