In its technical assistance report on the evaluation of the management of public investments in Gabon between 2010 and 2019, published on June 8, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) underlines that public investment in Gabon does not stimulate growth and investment spending does not automatically translate into real asset accumulation, which raises questions about the real effectiveness of such spending.
“Public investment continued to grow from 2009 to 2013 when it peaked at 15.2% of GDP. It registered an average growth of 5.7% between 1990 and 2018. At the same time, private investment fell, as did growth and the stock of public capital, “said the 69-page report. In terms of quality of infrastructure, the efficiency of public investments has halved from the optimal level forecast, compared to a drop of 20% in the world and in sub-Saharan Africa, as well as a drop of 31% within the area of the Member States of the Central African Economic and Monetary Community (CEMAC). According to the economists who participated in this analysis, improving the efficiency of public investment is essential, given the constraints of Gabon’s current budget.
The assessment also revealed weaknesses in the planning of public investments. The strategic and operational roles are not clearly defined and multiple actors draw up separate and uncoordinated lists of projects which sometimes have little to do with the final list selected for inclusion in the budget law. In addition, the choice of service providers is mainly based on tacit agreements; monitoring of project implementation is neither centralized nor adequately supervised, which results in poor budgetary, physical, financial and accounting synchronized execution.
“These planning flaws have a direct impact on the allocation of resources and the execution of projects. In the absence of well-coordinated planning, the allocation of resources for investment expenditures in the program budget becomes incomplete and subjective. A practice that lacks both transparency and proper control, ” the report said.
