NEWS
Faculty Spotlight – How to Impact Public Finance Practices Around the Globe: A Q&A With Charles Hankla
Nearly 30 years ago, Charles Hankla was living in Moscow, Russia, teaching English as a second language. At about the same time, from 1997 to 1999, a team of public finance experts from Georgia State University’s International Studies Program (ISP) was also in Moscow, helping to rebuild Russia’s tax system after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
At the time, Hankla didn’t know anything about Georgia State economist Jorge Martinez-Vazquez or the team he led to Russia from the newly formed Andrew Young School of Policy Studies (AYSPS), even though his father was a Georgia State physics professor. Now Hankla, the new director for international programs in the college’s Public Finance Research Cluster (PFRC), often relies on Professor Emeritus Martinez-Vazquez as a mentor and frequent co-contributor on projects for the ISP’s successor, the International Center for Public Policy (ICePP), which he leads.
In the Q&A that follows, Hankla talks about ICePP and his interest in this work, ICePP’s current projects in Mozambique, Cameroon, Nepal and Jordan, ICePP’s impact and his vision for what’s next.
How did you begin working with the ICePP team?
With my interests in political economy, I’ve always wanted to combine my academic work with a policy career, but I wasn’t sure how. Early on, I remember becoming aware that the International Studies Program was doing serious policy work with the World Bank and other organizations in the areas of financial governance, public finance and decentralization, and I got to know Jorge and some of the other people there. In 2008, Jorge asked me to participate in a USAID project for local government in Egypt. This was my first project with ICePP.
I also got to know a lot of the Ph.D. candidates who’ve worked with ICePP when I started serving on dissertation committees in economics and public policy. If there was a political element, I was put on the committee. Over time, I began co-authoring research with the Andrew Young School’s faculty and Ph.D. alumni, including the book, “Local Accountability and National Coordination in Fiscal Federalism: A Fine Balance.”
How do you describe the work of ICePP?
ICePP has three components to its work.
First, we provide technical assistance in the areas of public finance, decentralization and public financial management to developing countries. We advise and assist these countries in reforming their systems of public finance or decentralizing, often both. To do this work, we contract with global and regional institutions that promote social and economic development like the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the Asian Development Bank and others. Sometimes we subcontract through private firms like Deloitte.
Second, we provide professional training in public finance and fiscal decentralization to civil servants and others — usually those from developing countries or donor agencies — to help their organizations and institutions build capacity. For example, we recently hosted a week-long training on campus for 30 civil servants from Nepal. This group included leaders from the country’s Ministry of Finance, provincial (local) governments and other ministries. We can do this online or in person, and we can provide general training or focus on a topic they choose. We’re working on several models to do this training in the most efficient way possible.
Third is our research and teaching. We publish a steady number of policy and research papers, along with a series of working papers. We also host post docs and Fulbright scholars who come for up to a year to work on their projects. Right now, we’re hosting a Ph.D. candidate from China and Ph.D. researchers from Turkey, Belarus and South Korea. Just as important, we employ several Ph.D. candidates in public management and policy and economics from AYSPS who work part time in the Public Finance Research Cluster.
What is ICePP working on now?
Mozambique is our largest project, financed through the World Bank and contracted with the national government of Mozambique. Cameroon is financed and contracted with the World Bank. The Nepal project, including the training I mentioned earlier, is a USAID project subcontracted through Deloitte. And we have a project in Jordan subcontracted through DAI. I principally manage the first two projects and Andrey Timofeev manages the Nepal and Jordan projects.
Mozambique is a $1.2 million, two-year project with nine parts. ICePP has a 10-person team that includes five Georgia State experts and five from Mozambique or elsewhere. Our main purpose is to provide advice on virtually all major aspects of fiscal decentralization in the country.
Mozambique began a decentralization process after its civil war ended in 1992, when it began to create autonomous cities. After a more recent outbreak of fighting, the governing party and the former rebel party signed a peace agreement and developed a new constitution, one based in part on the principle that the opposition would give up its weapons and the government would decentralize. As a result, the country finds itself rethinking its whole decentralization system. Our role is to help them consider how decentralization can best happen and provide technical assistance showing how additional decentralization can work there. We will make recommendations on how to structure their local and provincial government taxation and expenditures based on international best practices. This project will end July 2025.
The Cameroon project is led by a senior economist at the World Bank who attended one of our training programs a while ago. She reached out to us through an Andrew Young alumnus, Bauyrzhan Yedgenov (M.A. ’11, Ph.D. ’17), to provide advice on the transfer system in Cameroon. The country is rethinking how to transfer funds from central to regional and communal governments and how to more fully and fairly finance these governments. We’re helping them rethink their formula, mapping how the money moves, doing computations about how much money needs to be transferred — the fiscal gap — and then recommending mechanisms for transferring the money. We’ve traveled to Cameroon to speak to its national and local leaders to get their perspectives. This project will end in May 2025.
Our projects in Jordan and Nepal, both through USAID, are both of longer standing than Mozambique and Cameroon, and they have both shown much success. In Jordan, we are analyzing the tax system and assisting in the creation of a graduate program in public finance at a local university. In Nepal, we are working primarily on the transfer system as well as on strengthening capacity in public finance among the country’s civil servants.
What do you feel makes ICePP’s work unique?
As a university, our role is to teach, engage in research and bring our findings — to the extent possible — into practice. We at ICePP and the whole Public Finance Research Cluster have a mission around research and teaching and connecting our work to practice. In other words, we bridge the gulf between academics and policy.
Our role is to bring international best practices to the countries we serve. We hope some of the knowledge and practices we bring them will be applied and result in benefits for regular people by making their governments more accountable and efficient.
Also, there just aren’t many universities who do this work. We have a special expertise in the fiscal decentralization area that started with AYSPS’s founder Roy Bahl, Jorge Martinez-Vazquez, Sally Wallace and others. Our reputation in this area began in the 1990s with the Russia project and the creation of the school, and we’re working to keep that strength going.
What do you see next for ICePP?
I’d like to be able to pull more people from public management and policy, economics and political science into this work. One of my hopes is to bring more faculty and students from other units at Georgia State as well into our projects, but right now, we’re in early days, though two of my Ph.D. students from political science are working on the Mozambique project.
Another thing I’d like to do is expand the scope of ICePP’s work. It will continue to be rooted in public finance, but there are opportunities to expand the work into governance, particularly when we think about the institutions that govern public finance. I’m hoping we can go deeper into this area and others.
NOTE: To learn more about ICePP and the PFRC, visit their websites at ICePP and PFRC.
— Jennifer French, Public Relations Manager, Andrew Young School of Policy Studies
Originally published at the university News Hub here.