Posted by Eivind Tandberg
The PFM blog was launched in September 2007. 2008 was our first full year of operations, and we wanted to give you a little overview of what has been happening on the blog during the year. We will provide some statistics about the use of the blog. We will also identify which articles were most popular among the readers, which PFM categories were most popular among our contributors and who were the most active contributors.
As mentioned in the heading, we made 176 postings to the blog during 2008. This is an average of 14.7 posts each month, or 3.4 each week. The highest number in a single month was in July, when we had 20 posts.
We had 128244 pageviews on the site during the year. The average number of daily views increased from about 250 a day at the beginning of the year to about 450 a day towards the latter part of the year, with an annual average of about 350 views per day. There were two noticable spikes in the daily visitor numbers during the year. We had 688 visitors on July 23. The post on this day was "Egypt hosts OECD budget law seminar". We had 682 visitors on December 15, when the post was "Counting the fiscal cost of the current crisis."
The main page, providing short synopses of the different posts, is by far the most read page on the PFM blog. But a large majority of viewers also open full articles. The posts continue to be read long after the time of posting. Three of the five most visited articles in 2008 were actually posted in 2007.
The 5 most read articles during 2008 were: (Posted)
1. A primer on public-private partnerships February 22, 2008
2. Making performance budgeting work October 4, 2007
3. Transition to accrual accounting October 15, 2007
4. From line-item to program budgeting November 21, 2007
5. Capital budgeting and public financial management March 3, 2008
Many of the articles on the blog cover several different aspects of PFM. We have tried to identify the main category for each post, to identify which topics were most popular among our contributors. The largest single group of posts were in the category PFM reforms, including both analytical notes and country examples, which comprised about 30 different posts. There were also several posts related to accountability and transparency issues, including PEFA assessments. These numbered about 25. Discussions of political economy, for instance how budget decisions are taken, accounted for about 20 posts. Following these three front-runners, there were several categories that all were covered by about 10 posts during the year. These included medium-term budgeting, expenditure policy issues, PFM institutions, news from the PFM blogosphere, financial management information systems and performance budgeting.
The most active contributors were, not surprisingly, Bill Dorotinsky and Michel Lazare, the founders of the blog. They both provided about 30 posts to the blog. Other active contributors included Ian Lienert, Francois Michel, Mario Pessoa, Christian Schiller and Marc Robinson, all from the IMF's Fiscal Affairs Department. There were several contributions from outside the IMF, the most active external contributor being Sanjay Vani in the World Bank.
The PFM blog does not yet have an active discussion forum. The average number of comments is less than one per blog post, and only a few posts generated any significant number of comments. The topic that generated most comments was medium-term budgeting.
