Every year, since 2021, GTAC’s PEPA Unit has hosted a Savings@Work conference to share insights, learning, challenges, and opportunities that emerge from completed spending reviews. In 2023 PEPA is joining forces with the GTAC Public Economics Winter School to create The Public Economics Conference taking place from 6 – 7 September under the theme “Employment and the economics of job creation: evaluating government employment programmes”.

This conference aims to unlock valuable, yet often inaccessible evidence, and shed light on why some programmes work and others don’t. Through presentations and discussions of outcomes and lessons learned, this conference provides an ideal platform for sharing and debating this substantial evidence base in the field of public economics.

Government plans to improve the links between policy development and implementation and key to achieving this is improving the analytical depth around planning and budgeting. In order to help give effect to this, PEPA has undertaken almost 50 technical spending reviews since mid-2013 and almost 180 student spending reviews through its capacity building initiatives.

Spending reviews play a vital role in building a capable state through empowering and capacitating officials to perform their own evidence-based baseline analyses and costing of government programmes and policies, using the proven spending review methodology.

So, get ready for the 2023 GTAC Public Economics Conference, where the spotlight shines on government’s initiatives to boost job creation and address unemployment, under the theme “Employment and the economics of job creation”. This year, we’re excited to tap into the wealth of knowledge accumulated through the research, project reviews and evaluations done by GTAC and the National Treasury  over the past decade.

Read more about the conference here.