Training Catalog Session Details

The course is aimed at participants who are relatively early in their career and are involved in the compilation of financial reporting expenditure data and government finance statistics. The course values the participation of more candidates with practical experience.

No specific academic qualifications required but anticipated that applicants will be educated to degree level.

Candidates must have relevant current and practical experience related to the course to be considered for invitation.

Classification of the Functions of Government (COFOG) is a classification defined by the United Nations Statistics Division and adapted to the IMF government finance statistics (GFS) reporting framework. COFOG enables trends in government expenditure by function (e.g., defense or education) or policy purposes to be examined over time. The value of this is that expenditure by functions of government of different countries can be compared. Participants will gain an understanding of how the ten functions of government as described in the GFSM 2014 are classified, how to categorize expenditure data to generate a functional split will be explained and how it should reconcile with the economic classification of expenditure data used in the GFS. Participants should feel comfortable to present and discuss relevant data of their own country. Practical exercises with participants working in random groups will feature throughout the course enabling them to be able to appropriately categorize expenditure data to the correct functional categories. Focus will be on the function environmental protection and how this can be used in conjunction with other government data on climate change to see how governments are addressing the issue. In addition, applications of COFOG for reporting select UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) indicators will be discussed.