Welcome to my blog, Public Finance Matters

Hi, I’m Tania Ajam and I teach public economics, public finance management and ICT at the School of Public Leadership at Stellenbosch University in the Western Cape, South Africa.

Sometimes when people ask me what I teach and I tell them, their response is “How boring!”. My standard rejoinder: “Do you think children’s access to quality education is boring? Do you think access to universal health care is boring? Do you think that access to water,  electricity and public transport is boring?”. The heart of the matter is that the state and trajectory of public finances today matter profoundly for the society and the economy we are trying to build tomorrow. Hence the title of this blog. Policies, plans and strategies, however laudable, will remain empty promises and political rhetoric unless they are affordable in the budget, over the implementation horizon. 

I started this blog in the hope that South African students of public financial management and public economics may benefit from having a website with up to date content, both practical and theoretical. Journal articles are often abstract and – because of protracted peer review processes – often out of touch with the practical challenges facing practitioners on the ground. Postgraduate students often struggle to come up with research topics because they’re not exposed to evolving debates and controversies.

Practitioners, on the other hand, tend to understand the operational realities of public financial management but lack the time or access to content in academic journals (which are often isolated behind pay walls and which public sector organisations do not typically budget for).

This blog focuses primarily on South African fiscal policy design and implementation simply because it is the only country of which I have enough understanding of the context, history, political economy, institutional arrangements and governance regimes to offer an informed opinion. The aim of this blog is to explore the sub-disciplines of public financial management in detail in the South African context – to go deep rather than broad. There are other international blogs on public financial management which do an excellent job of cross-country coverage, some of which are listed in the “Useful resources” page.

I dedicate this blog to my amazing high school economics teacher at Harold Cressy High School, Ms Barbara Houghton. She catalysed a life long interest in the dismal science by each year giving us the assignment of analysing the annual Budget and coming up with a better one. I’ve been doing that each year since for more than three decades.

I’ve been intending to start a blog for a long time. I never dreamed that I would do so in the second year of a global pandemic. It’s taken a while to garner the know-how to build this website. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed developing it.