Uzbekistan : Second Agricultural Public Expenditure Review
Public expenditures matter a lot for agricultural growth, food and nutrition security, sustainable food systems, and other interlinked developmental outcomes. The level of agricultural public spending is important as small budgets can rarely delive...
| Main Authors: | , , , , |
|---|---|
| Format: | Report |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2021
|
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/undefined/381251635752865696/Uzbekistan-Second-Agricultural-Public-Expenditure-Review http://hdl.handle.net/10986/36561 |
| Summary: | Public expenditures matter a lot for
agricultural growth, food and nutrition security,
sustainable food systems, and other interlinked
developmental outcomes. The level of agricultural public
spending is important as small budgets can rarely deliver
results, let alone drive any transformation of the sector.
Yet, global experience clearly shows that although greater
spending on agriculture is important, it does not always
guarantee better outcomes unless: (i) funds are allocated to
the ‘right’ programs and functions, which help address
market failures and deliver public goods (i.e., allocative
efficiency); (ii) the right programs are being implemented
well (i.e. implementation efficiency); and (iii) public
expenditures are supported by market-friendly agricultural
policies (i.e., no agricultural price distortions). Spending
more on agriculture without making progress on all the
above-mentioned conditions is not recommended, because
higher public spending without progress on agricultural
development could result in fiscal, inflation, exchange
rate, and other macroeconomic risks, which would backfire on
the agriculture sector itself in the medium to long run. The
quality of public spending is, therefore, an important
issue, which has become even more urgent during and in the
aftermath of the COVID-19 crisis. The crisis required
Uzbekistan to make substantial unforeseen public
expenditures, which resulted in the larger public borrowing
and lower fiscal space in the future. This report presents a
review of Uzbekistan’s AgPER to contribute to the policy
dialogue on the repurposing of public expenditures and
getting more value for money. This is the second AgPER for
Uzbekistan prepared by the World Bank in the last three
years. The first AgPER was completed in 2019. It fed into
the Agricultural Strategy, which was being prepared at that
time and later approved in October 2019. It set the
2016-2018 baseline of agricultural public expenditures for
the Agricultural Strategy, underpinning Annex 4, which
presented the direction of the major repurposing of
agricultural public expenditures by 2030. The expenditure
repurposing encompassed the phasing out of direct subsidies
coupled with production conditions and a move toward more
efficient farm support instruments, such as climate-smart
direct farm support and investments in general support
services to increase the developmental impact of public
expenditures. The first AgPER presented global lessons about
the impacts of various types of agricultural public
expenditures (for example, their functional composition) on
developmental outcomes in the agriculture sector, which were
considered in preparation of Annex 4 of the Agricultural Strategy. |
|---|