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This study provides a literature review on school funding formulas across OECD countries. It looks at three salient questions from a comparative perspective: i) What kind of school formula funding schemes exist and how are they used, particularly for promoting the needs of socially disadvantaged pupils?; ii) How do school formula funding regimes perform according to equity and efficiency standards?; iii) What are the unresolved issues? Formula funding of schools, as opposed to administrative discretion and bidding, relies on a mathematical formula containing a number of variables (e.g. number of pupils), each of which has attached to it a cash amount to determine school budgets. Across OECD countries there are four main groups of variables in such formulas: i) student number and grade level-based; ii) needs-based; iii) curriculum or educational programme-based and; iv) school characteristics-based. Sometimes output and outcome-related variables are also used. The performance of formula funding compared to alternative funding regimes is dependent on the details of the formula and on the wider education policy environment. Formula funding systems typically advance transparency and accountability at low administrative costs and in combination with matching complementary policy tools they can also contribute to equity and efficiency. Currently, there are several ongoing debates across OECD countries: First, there is an inherent tradeoff between transparency/simplicity and sensitivity to local conditions/complexity. Second, knowing how much educating to a given standard costs is problematic and subject to heated debates. The main reason for this is that the causal relationship between education costs and student performance is largely unknown and even the identified impacts appear to be relatively small. Third, even though resources are allocated according to need estimation, they might not be devoted to these needs. Fourth, it is still undecided whether the introduction of school formula funding regimes has changed actual school funding practice.

Education

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Governments in all OECD countries are facing the challenge of governing increasingly complex education systems. There is a growing need for governance structures that can handle this complexity and which can provide actors with the knowledge they need to make decisions. This working paper asks the question: How do governance and knowledge mutually constitute and impact on each other in complex education systems? It provides an answer through a state of the art literature review and original theoretical argumentation. It breaks new ground by combining different schools of academic and policy thinking which traditionally look at various aspects of the relationship between governance and knowledge separately. Research in public management, political science and public policy, sociology, institutional economics, and organisational management (particularly the knowledge transfer literature) is augmented with work from education and other social sciences, including healthcare, law, and social justice. This working paper argues that just as knowledge is crucial for governance, governance is indispensible for knowledge creation and dissemination. It proposes an analytical framework that combines models of governance with modes of learning and types of knowledge, and provides preliminary empirical examples to support this framework. In the context of diverse social, economic and political environments of OECD countries, the interaction between these two focal points – models of governance and types of knowledge – has become increasingly relevant to researchers, policy makers, and education stakeholders more generally.

Education

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This TNM addresses the assessment of corruption risks in public procurement and their impact on relative prices. The note presents the Corruption Cost Tracker, an online tool complementing the analysis presented in Abdou and others (2022). The Corruption Cost Tracker enables policymakers and stakeholders to address corruption risks in public procurement. It is an interactive online tool, with dashboards for Corruption Risk Analysis, Spending Analysis, Efficiency Gains, and Policy Scenarios.

Administrative Processes in Public Organizations --- Bureaucracy --- Communicable diseases --- Corporate crime --- Corruption --- Covid-19 --- Crime --- Criminology --- Diseases: Contagious --- Expenditure --- Expenditures, Public --- Health Behavior --- Health --- Infectious & contagious diseases --- International Taxation --- Monetary economics --- National Government Expenditures and Related Policies: General --- National Government Expenditures and Related Policies: Procurement --- Public finance & taxation --- Public Finance --- Publicly Provided Goods: General --- Revenue administration --- Tax administration and procedure --- Tax Evasion and Avoidance --- Total expenditures --- White-collar crime

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This paper sets out to measure and analyze corruption risks, patterns of favoritism, and state capture in public procurement in Bulgaria. It draws on two main types of data: large-scale administrative data on public procurement and the list of politically exposed persons. The analysis rests on calculating individual corruption risk indicators (or red flags), such as single bidding in competitive markets, and creating a composite Corruption Risk Index based on these indicators. It maps the distribution of these red flags over time, across different regions and markets. The analysis finds that Bulgaria shows high corruption risk among other examined countries in the European Union, with weak institutions contributing to slow gross domestic product per capita convergence to Western European countries. The results point out that corruption risks have deteriorated over time. Combining suppliers' political connections information with public procurement corruption risk data shows that connections are associated with higher risks, in particular connections to local government members and state-owned enterprises. The large-scale analysis of buyer-supplier contracting networks points at state capture patterns where groups of buyers and suppliers repeatedly connect in high corruption risk procurement contracts. Such groups have gained more power and control over a larger share of contracts since 2016. Finally, policy recommendations are provided in three areas: enhancing data scope and quality, introducing a data-driven approach to corruption risk assessment, and improving public procurement policy and practices to reduce noncompetitive tenders.

Corruption.