Over the past two decades, there has been a paradigm shift in public administration and public sector accounting around the world, with increasing emphasis on good governance and accountability processes for government entities. This is all driven both by economic rationalism, and by changing expectations of what governments can and should do. An important aspect of this accountability and governance process is the establishment and effective functioning of a Public Accounts Committee (PAC), a key component of democratic accountability. With contributions from renowned scholars and practitioners, and using case studies from around the world, this research-based collection examines the rationales for current roles of the PACs and explores the links between PACs and National Audit Offices. It also compares PAC practices from developing and developed countries such as Africa, Asia, Pacific islands, and Europe with both Westminster and non-Westminster models of government. This will be valuable reading for academics, researchers, and advanced students in public management, public accounting and public sector governance.

The coalition Government has committed to increasing the Department for International Development's total aid spending from £7.8 billion in 2010-11 to £11.5 billion in 2014-15. The Department aims to improve and expand state primary education, focusing on sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. It works largely by influencing and financing developing country governments to pursue Millennium Development Goals. The Committee supports these aims, but expresses concerns about its ability to assess the value for money of its spending. Fourteen of the 22 countries the Department supports are on track to meet Millennium Development Goals for primary enrolment by 2015. The Committee also expresses concern that the Department cannot adequately attribute impacts to its spending and its influence. Even for its largest programmes, such as India, it typically contributes a low proportion of the countries' education spend. For the Committee, the Department needs to place value for money as the primary focus when allocating resources or assessing the performance of its education programmes. It needs to focus on how many children attend and complete primary education, along with the literacy and numeracy they achieve.

Public enterprises have played a central part in the development of all mixed economies in the post-war period, but they are now in a crisis phase. Privatisation has pushed back the level of public enterprise almost throughout the world. Where public enterprises remain, they are being brought under significant reforms. Originally published in 1991, this book presents a comprehensive critique of public enterprise, analysing why its performance has fallen far short of expectations. Part one is concerned with the establishment of public enterprises: the case for them, the circumstances in which they emerged, the extra enterprise objectives attached to them, and the decisions on their investment feasibility and capital structure. Part two looks at the working of public enterprises: the state of their financial performance, the peculiarities of pricing, the determination of targets which they should meet, the continuous monitoring and evaluation of their operations. Macro concerns are the focus of Part three. Among the issues addressed are the level of indirect taxation and subsidisation implicit in the pricing structures of public enterprises, the links between public enterprise and the public exchequer and the implications of their operations for distributional equity. In Part four the extent to which privatisation can solve the problems of public enterprise is discussed. The book ends with some broad conclusions on the future of public enterprise. Throughout, the approach is analytical, but the arguments are supported by extensive examples from both developed and developing economies.

Train to Gain has delivered a substantial expansion of training that is flexible and meets employers' needs. By July 2009, 1.4 million learners had been supported, and around 200,000 employers had staff involved in training through the programme. There have, however, been serious weaknesses in the way the programme has been managed by the LSC, an executive non departmental public body of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. It started badly with over-ambitious targets, and under-spending in the first two years as the programme failed to sufficiently expand demand for, and supply of, training. In year three, eligibility for training was widened which, together with the recession, increased the attractiveness of the programme for employers. At the same time training providers were still being pressed to increase training activity. These factors led to a swing from under-spend to overspend, resulting in the current unacceptable position where too much training is in the pipeline and employers with new requirements are being turned away. Three common failings in public sector programmes are responsible for this situation: initially high targets that do not reflect reality as they are not based on evidence of what is achievable; action to address under-performance that takes insufficient account of trends in demand and capacity and economic factors, such as recession; poor, untimely management information, making it difficult to identify and respond to problems quickly. For Train to Gain, the priority is to bring expenditure under control while minimising damage to training providers and the demand for training.