The European Commission is currently engaged, through Eurostat, in the production of EPSAS, the European Public Sector Accounting Standards, to be used for financial reporting by governments of all member states.

This Europe-wide action accompanies (and encourages) country-based projects, aimed at establishing, in each member state, an appropriate set of accrual-based standards. These are more or less stringently inspired by IPSAS and EPSAS, but can also have different sources of inspiration. The country-based projects are normally under the responsibility of specific standard setters, variously disciplined in the different countries.

We refer here to, e.g., the French Public Sector Accounting Standards Council (Conseil de normalisation des comptes publics – CNOCP), the Portuguese Comissão de Normalização Contabilística – Administrações Públicas, the Swiss Public Sector Financial Reporting Advi-sory Committee (SRS-CSPCP), the Italian Standard Setter Board, the German Gremium zur Standardisierung des staatlichen Rechnungswesens.

Both the European and the national paths deserve a careful investigation, so as to understand the drivers of the different choices, to evaluate their strengths and weaknesses, and to antici-pate their outcomes.

Special attention has to be paid to governance aspects: while technical aspects (e.g.: benefits and shortcomings of each possible set of standards) have been largely studied, the way the standard setting bodies work, their level of independence, the way their members are select-ed, the length of terms, the resources available (just to name some) are only seldom investi-gated.

However, the potential impact of the standard setting bodies is very high, as each of them can have a fundamental role, in the relevant country, in defining the set of rules to be followed by all public sector institutions.

This paper intends to fill this gap, and to investigate how national standard setters are estab-lished and governed, their remits, the way they work, the resources they are allocated, their accountability.

The research is aimed both at describing, and therefore at producing an overall picture of the current situation, and at evaluating, at least tentatively, the adequacy of the different solutions.

The paper will make three contributions.

Mapping the different institutional and organizational settings chosen in different jurisdictions and comparing them with the IPSASB and the Eurostat model allows to detect similarities and differences, and to check if some homogeneous frameworks are emerging.

The second contribution concerns the power relations: to what extent is the standard setter independent from the political power? Who takes the fundamental decisions? Where does the standard setter’s legitimacy stem from?

A third contribution is related to the external (international) activity of the standard setters, and will check if and how they devote a significant part of their work to take part in international activities, also to represent and promote their countries’ national interest.

This research is exploratory, and covers a sample of European countries, which will be stud-ied with a comparative method.

The empirical investigation is based on:

• official documents, retrieved in the websites of the relevant standard setters, so as to understand the most important aspects of their governance;

• and on subsequent semi-structured interviews administered to members thereof;

• finally, the findings and their interpretation will be discussed with scholars of the rele-vant countries, so as to refine them.

In the Conclusions, the contributions of the paper will be wrapped-up, and some directions for future research will be suggested. We will also elaborate on the limitations of this research.

Extended abstract:

Conduction of spending reviews have a long, consolidated tradition in some developed countries such as UK, Canada or Netherland. After the financial crisis of 2008 the importance of spending reviews revived as they could be an important trigger for generation of fiscal space via so called smart cuts (van Nispen, 2014). In addition, in the current context of post covid and climate emergency, the effective allocation of public resources has become a top policy priority.

Spending reviews can be defined as "the process of developing and adopting savings measures, based on systematic scrutiny of baseline expenditures (Robinson, 2013, p.2). Spending reviews can be of efficiency type (savings are achieved by improving efficiency) or of strategic type (savings are achieved because of reduction of transfer of service. In contrast to across-the-board cuts, typically practiced urgently during crises, spending reviews give rise to the savings resulting from the re-prioritization of public spending. Spending reviews can take a global scale when conducted on large segments of public expenditures or entire budget; or to be more selective, targeting concrete policies or programs.

While previous research was mostly relating spending reviews with cutback management (Agasisti et al., 2015), it is less clear their contribution in terms of evaluation of public policies and programs and therefore their real contribution to evidence based public policies (Mayne, 2018; Mc David, 2018).

Spain introduced spending reviews in 2018 following the recommendation of European Council (European Comission, 2020; Kasperskaya and Xifré, 2018 , 2019). Being a country with a relatively little culture of public policies' evaluations, its case it can provide valuable insights for practitioners and academics.

The objectives of this study are the following:

(1) Describe comprehensively the introduction of spending reviews in Spain, including its organizational and managerial aspects.

(2) To analyze to which extent the recommendations of spending reviews are aligned with the goals of sustainable development.

This study follows a case study methodology based on the analysis of institutional and internal documents posted by AIReF (Spain's new Fiscal Council, created in 2013) and publicly available data from the OECD, European Commission and Ministry of Finance of Spain. We also interviewed some key decision makers.

Our preliminary results show that in terms of institutional design Spanish followed quite a unique path by commissioning the design, implementation, and coordination of spending reviews to the independent organization (AIReF). It is not clear however whether the AIReF will have enough capacity to sustain spending reviews on a larger scale, coordinating the complex network of the stakeholders in the Spanish administrative system. Spanish spending reviews so far are selective and targeted at the concrete programs of public sector expenditures such as for instance postal service, drug prescriptions in public health system. While the amount of the public expenditure scrutinized by spending reviews is not high relative to the entire public budget, the scrutiny has revealed concrete margins for improving efficiency in spending in some concrete policies and programs. The alignment with sustainability goals is not homogeneous across public policies evaluated.

References

Agasisti, T., Arena, M., Catalano, G. and Erbacci, A. (2015) Defining spending reviews: a proposal for a taxonomy , with applications to Italy and the UK, Public Money and Management, 35(6), pp. 423-429.

European Comission (Directorate-General for Economic and Financial Affairs) (2020) Spending Reviews: Some Insights from Practitioners, ed. by Bova, E., Ercolli, R., Vanden Bosch, X.), available at https://ec.europa.eu/info/publications/economic-and-financial-affairs-publications_en.

Kasperskaya, Y and Xifré, R. (2018) Assessing the role of Spain’s AIReF in the context of EU fiscal policy. Spanish Economic and Financial Outlook (SEFO), vol. 7, no. 4, 61-73

Kasperskaya, Y., and Xifré, R. (2019). Reform or Resist? The tale of two fiscal reforms in Spain after the crisis, Public Money & Management, Vol. 39, No. 7, 494-502.

McDavid, J., Brouselle, A., Shepherd, R.P., Zussman, D. (2018) Linking Evaluation and Spending reviews: Challenges and Prospects, Canadian Journal of Program Evaluation, Special Issue, pp.297-304

van Nispen Frans K. M. (2016) Policy Analysis in Times of Austerity: A Cross- National Comparison of Spending Reviews, Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis: Research and Practice, 18(5), pp. 479-501

Mayne, J. (2018) Linking Evaluations to Expenditures Reviews: Neither Realistic nor a Good Idea, Canadian Journal of Program Evaluation, Special Issue, pp.316-326.

Robinson, M. (2013) Spending Reviews, OECD Journal on Budgeting, Volume 2013(2) , pp. 1-43

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