Hello from the Peak District

It’s been quite a while since I last wrote a newsletter. Sorry to say that it has taken being forced to work at home to focus my mind on developing my online courses. 

First let me say that I hope you are safe and well, and following your government’s guidelines for social distancing wherever you are in the world. (I know there are people receiving this message in Asia, Africa, South America and Europe.)

What have I been doing these last months?

Actually a lot of my work has been writing courses. I contributed to a course for the Attorney General of Pakistan and then wrote the Certificate in Public Financial Management course for ACCA. That course was published in December and covers the whole public financial management cycle at an introductory level. Feel free to check it out here.

On the subject of ACCA’s qualifications, for several years I have contributed to their Certificate in International Public Sector Accounting Standards (CertIPSAS) and you can check that course out here.

I continue to teach the public sector financial management module on the University of Nottingham’s Master’s in Public Policy. Last November’s class was about twice the size of previous years and was expected to be even bigger in 2020. I don’t know if that will happen or not as the majority of the students come from outside the UK.

However many students ultimately enrol in the course, I wonder if it will be delivered online. Universities managed to move pretty much all their teaching online in a couple of weeks and I wonder if they will ever go back to lecturing groups of 50 or more students. I live 80km from the University of Nottingham so I would actually be very happy to move to online teaching because it would save me a lot of time and money in travelling to Nottingham.

On the subject of universities moving their teaching online, a conversation on Twitter a couple of weeks ago led to me being interviewed about my book as an online resource for students of the MSc in Strategic Public Leadership at Northumbria University. You can find the video of the interview here.

In recent months I have also had the chance to do some teaching in Kazakhstan and Dubai.

Managing Public Money online courses

The lockdown in the UK has pushed me back into writing online course material for my own online school. I have a (very) long list of ideas for courses and e-books which I want to create. I am excited about all of them and need to force myself to do only one at a time.

Whilst I am creating the next course, my Financial Modelling in the Public Sector course is still live. To celebrate the re-boot of this newsletter you can access the course at half price using the discount code FINMOD50 at checkout.

Public financial management in the news

The news has, of course, been dominated by coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic but this has a very strong public financial management angle to it. We are seeing governments rapidly design and implement packages to support businesses and individuals to mitigate the economic impact of social distancing measures. Here in the UK, for example, the government will pay 80% of the salaries of workers who would otherwise be made redundant by their employers and a similar type of programme for self-employed workers. 

In terms of the use of public money this could be a glimpse into a future where automation and technology means that there is not full-time employment for everyone. Without work as the way to earn money may mean governments have to develop universal basic income programmes for giving money to citizens so that there is enough. There have been pilots of this sort of programme in Canada, Finland and elsewhere.

The massive government spending programmes being implemented will greatly exceed tax receipts in many countries and many people are asking questions about how the spending will be paid for. Economists like Stephanie Kelton who support Modern Monetary Theory would say that this is the wrong way to look at things. Governments don’t need to borrow the money to spend on Covid-19 responses: they can simply create it and put it into circulation in the economy by paying wages and buying goods. Eventually they will take that money back out of the economy through taxation. I know this is not the way that taxation is generally thought about but if you want to know more, a documentary called Finding the Money will soon be released. Here’s the trailer.

Keep in touch

You can keep in touch with me in many ways. First, of course, you can reply to this email. You can also follow me on Twitter, or connect with me on LinkedIn and FaceBook.

If you think this newsletter would be useful to a friend or colleague send them this link — https://managingpublicmoney.co.uk/signup — so they can sign up.

That’s it for this month.

Best wishes,
Gary.