Special Talk

"Net Economies and Public Finance Statistics: the SIOPE Experience" By Carlo Maria Arpaia, Bank of Italy, Italy

Abstract

Monitoring of public finance aggregates and ratios has become more and more important within the EU in compliance with Maastricht Treaty parameters; the need for timely data about public spending trends is particularly pressing in Italy, where a high public debt ratio exists alongside non-uniform accounting standards across public entities and the
Government's intention to introduce fiscal federalism. In order to address this issue, the Italian Ministry for the Economy and Finance (MEF) and the Bank of Italy decided to create the General Government Transactions Information System (SIOPE). After 3 years of intensive work with different types of public entities, their banks, software houses and other
stakeholders, SIOPE now receives on a daily basis electronic data covering 90 per cent of S-13 public entities cash-flows, enabling MEF and the Italian National Institute of Statistics (Istat) to speed up the processing of public finance data. Even if SIOPE still has ample scope to improve data quality and develop new outputs, it is a clear example of what successful outcomes are possible with inter-institutional cooperation and an intensive use of network technologies. The aim of this paper is to illustrate the main advantages of SIOPE's working method and the main problems to be addressed, in order to provide other countries (especially emerging economies) with guidelines on creating this kind of information system.

Keywords: General government, State and local budget expenditure, technological change