 Welcome to everyone. My name is Alberto Square. I'm a senior lecturer in the School of Finance and Management which is one of the departments of SOAS University of London. And I welcome you to this event where I've been invited to share with you some views into the sort of stuff we do research and teach within the School of Finance and Management. It is just a small take towards what we do. We carry on in our activity but hopefully can provide some sense for you to better see who we are and what we do at SOAS and so on. I'd like to share some slides and setting up in one second. As I'm sharing one of the applications they have here open on my screen and I believe you must be able to see the slides at present. Pause for one second if there is any comment but possibly I can safely go on with the presentation if you can see the slides as I presume. Within SOAS it's a SOAS University of London. There are several departments and I belong to the School of Finance and Management so you may be familiar with SOAS. It's located in the very centre of London, just the corner of Russell Square, just a very close if you just a one-minute walk from a SNAID house and the British Museum. Within SOAS there are departments like the School of Finance and Management to which I belong which runs a number of undergrad, postgraduate programmes and PhD programmes and I specifically convene a teach in one of the MSc programmes, the MSc Public Policy Finance and Management which you can see here on the slide. There are other MSc programmes like Accounting and Finance, International Financial Management, International Business. Obviously as I convene a teach in Public Policy Finance and Management my main interest is in the area of public sector management, the broadly conceived. I'm interested in the process of making policies, implementing evaluating policies. I'm interested in the process of managing government and public sector organisations. I'm also interested in the process of managing financial resources in the public sector and that's specifically what I'd like to share with you a few thoughts about. What I do here is actually to share some of the writings I'm doing these very weeks as I decided to embark myself into a small paper which is intended to elaborate on an argument which was put forward about 10 years ago from the side of various colleagues. You can see here at the bottom of the slide the reference. So it was 2011 when in the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory we had an interesting short piece called Why Public Financial Management Matters and the authors. There were several authors, you see Keoko, Malawi, Matsuki, Moody, Smith and Zhao. I occasionally referred to this piece of work whenever I teach because there is an interesting argument there. There may be arguments that we have in public sector management. They use areas of study and we can spot an area on public financial management or PFM and an area on public administration management or PAM. So public financial management has to do obviously with all the processes concerning the management of financial resources in the public sector. We have fiscal planning, we have budgeting, we have taxation, we have cash management, debt management, internal control system, auditing and so on. Public administration and management instead typically has to do with a way in which public sector organizations implement public policies. So issues concerning planning, staffing, resourcing, these entities carrying out the programs and projects and eventually evaluating what they deliver. Ten years ago these authors observed that there is unfortunately a sort of intellectual bifurcation between PFM and PAM. In the sense that the two areas of scholarship, they do have a fairly limited dialogue with each other. There is a focus concern on the side of PFM on the technicalities of managing financial resources, but it doesn't seem to be by and large much of a mutual change and the ways to investigate how the study of the financial, the management of the financial resource can affect the business managing and administering public organizations. It's not always the case that there are some studies specifically on budgeting for instance which typically may look at the technicalities of budgeting but they also discuss the politics around the budgetary process. But this was counted as an exception. So they completed this work about 10 years ago with a call in around the ways in which research on public financial management could be made more relevant to the way in which we manage government and public sector organizations. They suggested three specific areas where these studies could focus on as you can see in this slide. So they argued that research on public financial management could help PAM investigate the role of administrative expertise in democratic institutions. So this has to do with the relationship between typically elected politicians and representative bodies like parliaments and the government and the bureaucracy and the extent to which the technical expertise in the bureaucracy relates to the process of making decisions about managing the public sector within democratic institutions. But another area where PFM could contribute is how to improve the performance of public organizations. Public organizations typically have various dimensions of performance just to think about schools or hospitals or employment agencies. And of course much of this performance is not quite a financial one but nevertheless still pursuing the capacity of public sector entities to break even and improving efficiency, cost effectiveness of public sector entities can facilitate or can support the achievement of performance also in other dimensions. And finally the argue PFM research could also help investigate how public sector organizations can improve their adaptiveness to changing environment especially whenever they face a strategic problem about a better understanding the changing conditions of the environment and where to invest and where to find the resources in order to be better able to perform in the future. That's where we could say we stood up to the argument which was put forward from the side of these authors 10 years ago. And their concern about increasing public financial management with the generally public administration and management could make sense especially if you think about the context where they discussed these ideas. So 10 years ago it was the context still in the aftermath of the financial crisis 2008-09 which had various repercussions including increased the level of public debt in governments. And this entailed also sometimes a reduction of the level of public services together with austerity measures or some forms of restructuring of the systems for delivery of public services. I believe we can argue nowadays public financial management could be just more important than ever. The last decade has been very dense with events which affect the way in which the public sector works. So 2015 the launch of the sustainable development goals and the mini programs concerning poverty reduction to climate change and so on which affect decisions from the side of governments about dedicating resources to implement programs in these areas. Of course other initiatives like the Framework Convention on Climate Change brings the importance of energy transition diversification of energy sources at the top of the agenda of many of many countries. Over the last decade the full rise of China in the economic arena did have important repercussions in terms of international finance and financial flows. And then of course in the very last few years we could experience first the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and the consequential effects in terms of deficits for the budgets of many governments especially with the drop of revenue because of the lockdowns and reduction of business activity and also on the other hand the surge of public spending like in healthcare. And then more recently of course we still live around the Russia-Ukraine conflict and we can just anticipate at this stage the effect this may have on international trade and domestic GDP in various countries and therefore also on public finances. So I believe the scenario is one where the code still makes sense to think back at public financial management and to better investigate the way in which public financial management could relate to and possibly contribute more generally to the studies on public administration and management. So there are basically three questions I still entertain myself to think and to write about. First just empirically to look at whether anything has been done in the last decades in order to close to fix this intellectual bifurcation which was identified about ten years ago. To think about why if this bifurcation exists is still there and how an improved theoretical dialogue between public financial management and public administration and management could take place. On the empirical side of this of this research well it is just to have a look by means of the bibliographic bibliometric assisted sorry literature review to look at what kind of studies have been done around the public financial management especially the last decade. So I went through one of our search engines we had at universities to search for articles journal articles and from one of those scopus as you can see I could spot a number of articles publications with the phrase public financial management or public sector financial management published in the area of social sciences and generally. So the phrase that the term by itself already starts to be used in the 70s but possibly you can spot from the diagram how precisely in the last decade there has been a remarkable increase of interest from the side of scholars towards public financial management as you can see the vertical line is there after 2011 so after Kyoko and other colleagues publication and clearly the number of articles which have been published in the last decade is quite considerable there is a growing interest towards public financial management. If you look at where these works have been published but first you may spot we're not quite talking about the too many works first as you can see I could spot like the 33 articles published over the last decade and a number of them are in a kind of a second tier journals in the area of the public sector management generally so top journals are roughly indicated by an indicator like scopus site score and so you can see like public administration review or public management reviews there in the bottom of this ranking they just highlight how these venues do not quite pay much attention to issues of public financial management or just the works which have been done on public financial management they do not quite find much or a lot to say in venues which are more about public financial public public public administration and management and journal like public money management which is the one on the top of the list is clearly more dedicated to the study of public financial management by itself so generally also apart from the matrix if you look at the if you if we read these works which have been studied we can find that the typically obviously referred related to issues which are at the very core of public financial management but the very weekly if at all related to concerns broader concerns of public administration and management so these could be studies about making reforms of public financial management especially introducing a cruel accounting in the public sector or international public sector accounting standards specifically there are some works concerning fiscal risk and sustainability of public finances especially in scenarios of austerity which are which are imposed to the country and there are a few studies which tend to look at public financial management systems and practices in emerging economies like or in countries which have been relatively less studied so far like Iraq or Afghanistan for instance and a few studies just concern about how to improve the curriculum what we teach in public financial management so by and large I believe we may share an impression that such an intellectual verification which was lamented that ten years ago is still there what's it the case is it just a natural state of affairs after all that you know we have scholars who tend to specialize on public financial management topics only and they may not have an interest to engage with the broader literature on public administration and management well there are a number of reasons I believe that why this state of affairs exists and can persist could be just a plain division of labor you know as academics we can't really study everything and in every field there is a natural inclination towards just to be more specialized in some topic rather than than other and other ones and can be quite challenging to to bridge different areas that could be also institutional reasons in the sense that some scholars could be intellectually more attached to certain disciplines than others so public financial management is clearly more related to accounting and finance and the public administration and management could be more related broadly if you like to political science or public law or more specific areas like public administration and management there could be like a parallel trajectory of embarking into research of course interdisciplinary research is always possible but sometimes in terms of productivity of research this may not be quite an advantageous route to take there could be however also pretty much an epistemological position so I mean what kind of approach to research is followed in these different areas and I would say the main pressure public financial management is pretty much a concern with documenting practices providing accounts of how public financial management systems have been designed how they work and providing advice on the basis of such an evidence about how next public financial management systems can be can be reproduced sometimes even just descriptive accounts of of pfm systems and practices on the other hand research on public administration management is a bit more diverse there are of course even descriptive descriptive approaches there but on the other hand epistemologically speaking research not part of research on public administration and public management has also embarked into a research oriented towards developing theories and then testing theories empirically so more of a mode of research around drawing hypothesis from theories which are then tested that means of various evidence collected for example through survey questionnaires out of a large amount of accounts of the way in which public administration and management practices are followed so for a number of reasons I believe we can spot various ways in which public financial management and public public administration and management tend to diverge from from each other and an open question then is whether is there any way to find a common ground to find that some way where actually research which is done in public financial management and public administration management could actually recognize their work along similar lines this could help to exchange views on their findings this could help finding designs for doing research where both pfm and public administration and management concerns can be can be shared and an idea I'd like to elaborate is the one of looking at at least the part of what is done in public financial management and public administration and management as having to do with the tackling design questions so design questions relates to the general idea of design science and the design science brings back to ideas especially coming from Herber Simon Herber Simon I believe is reputed as the only possibly Nobel Prize laureate in the area of public administration he wrote extensively about many areas including economics but definitely he also spent a lot of attention towards processes of especially making decision within public administration within government and the part of the arguments coming from Herber Simon where that we should be clearly distinguish sciences of the nature and sciences of the artificial as they put it and the sciences of the artificial has to do with investigating everything which are eventually artifacts created by us as humans so if you like a main line it may oversimplify here is that it's not quite the same to investigate the laws of nature and to the design to devise theories to formulate hypothesis and to expect evidence to falsify these hypothesis or not we may we may argue we do not know much about what's what's at source in the design of nature as we understand it but when we deal with what humans do in the social domain economics in public administration in government in managing public finances here we're dealing with the objects artifacts which are created by by by humans part of them are created in a very deliberate effort with design how to better take corruption practices in a public administration sometimes some of what humans do just in a sense arises out of their interaction so there are habits which are formed there are routines which are acquired and eventually the way which they behave is not quite completely deliberately designed and so therefore we may have a question about investigating how is it a certain state of affairs came out when approaching the science of artificial Simon suggested that well we are doing a particular sort of intellectual investigative inquiry because part of it is about precisely how to design such such systems so if you take as a matter of analogy the work an architect does an architect is embarking in a professional discipline which consists eventually in the production of an artifact which can be a particular unique house which has been built in order to get to that final end state there are a number of artifacts which are produced like the very designs of their house which is still to be to be built the way in which the design of the house is made typically comes out of a number of factors there are requirements coming from the needs of the client and there are a set of conditions including constraints which arise from the context where the design solution is to be applied so every house to be designed by the architect is a unique case in a sense so it does have to fulfill the unique needs and requirements of the specific client and it tends to take into account the specific unique features of the location could be wind, sun, shape of the terrain and so on and so on so how does an architect proceed it does not quite start from scratch it does not need to reinvent the wheel there are a number of principles typically condensed into what can be called design references like general principles about how we can design how we can solve the solutions for the specific design problem at hand okay so how to do with the light coming specifically from one side then another one or the wind and so on and so on so eventually what is produced is a specific design solution to that specific specific problem so I digressed a bit too much probably but the main point is that there has been a tendency then over the decades to also conceive part of social sciences social science research especially having to do with the design problems so there are design problems like how to design an improved way to deliver education in schools how to design a more efficient way to deliver healthcare or how to design an improved way to to to take a corruption in administrative practices or to improve planning, fiscal planning for our administration and so on and so on recently these arguments have been especially elaborated on the side of public administration and management by some colleagues of mine I'd like to mention here Professor Michael Balsely currently working at the LSE working at the LSE just 20 minutes walk from Sousa who used to be my supervisor of my PhD which I did at the LSE years ago and in his recent works precisely he elaborated the further the idea that public administration can be conceived as a design science public management can be conceived as a design oriented professional professional discipline and my interest at present is specifically in public financial management and what they believe can be told that they are is that what counts as a lot of research in PFM which is done around descripting and explaining how public financial management systems and practice work actually could be even better conceived as well as efforts to to help take design problems and offering design solutions eventually public financial management specialists come out with a number quite a considerable repertoire of ideas concerning how the financial resource can be can be managed how can we plan for it how can we design a taxes in order to extract the resources from our our economy how can we procedurally orchestrate our planning programming process so that the needs from the society can be taken into account within the venues institutional venues for producing plans programs individually budgets in government and in public sector organizations and so on and so on all of these I believe we can conceive as offering design solutions to design problems of course again with a very similarity to what are general design problem scenarios like for instance diversity of design solution taking into consideration the specific needs requirements of a client and specific condition to deal with so for example here I should mention it becomes quite apparent how apart from general principles of designing public financial management systems and theories the local context does matter so designing a system for doing the budgeting or internal control system in one country could be quite different from another country because all the institutional social system of routines and practices in every local context can be quite different and therefore also pfm systems and practices may need to be tailored to the specific specific conditions at the very end of my argument I just put forward the idea that remained a bit skeptical that the original proposal from the side of those authors was quite quite fruitful because in a sense they argued that pfm studies could focus their attention on some topics which are of general interest to public administration management but in such a way I believe that research on pfm would be an ancillary role with respect to pmm research and would need to divert their attention from away from the focus concern of the discipline I believe it can be just more fruitful to be quite deliberate explicit about the existence of problems which are not those to explain to develop theories about how is it why is it that things happen but these are more questions about design so how we can design systems which can take issues at the core of interest for public financial management but at the same time they also have implications and that can be shared as a matter of design issues also from the side of public administration and management so some examples questions like you see on the slide how fraud and corruptions and corruption can be successfully prevented, deterred, detected and sanctioned and this is the core of public financial management but clearly answer to a question about how to design to provide a solution to such an issue so could be quite of concern also for public administration and management how public money can be shown to be spent effectively and efficiently it has to do with the budget execution it also has to do with accountability and how emergencies no experience from the outbreak of the pandemic or the one of the war can be promptly promptly tackled which is something which calls for a response not just in terms of leveraging resources like foreign aid or military resources but also how we can marshal the financial resources in order to cope with an emergency so it is all around these how questions about how to design something and to create the new artifacts which can perform better where I believe both PFM and public administration and management research could find a common ground well I've been talking for about 25 minutes I believe and my intention is not to make a presentation too long after all you know 20 minutes is kind of a standard length of a presentation since we make in academic conferences and presumably also quite how much my audience could stand especially given the digital medium of interaction so just to stop here as I said at the beginning this is a short presentation was mainly intended to help convey what kind of questions what kind of studies of issues we are concerned in doing our research in the School of Finance and Management although of course I'm just opening a specific take around the public sector and management because that's where I come from that's my main idea of expertise at this stage I may ask Katie also to help coordinate because I would be very happy if you like to open a discussion around these these ideas if you have any any interest and experience in the way in which the public sector works how financial resources and problems around financial resources are taken in the public sector otherwise equally I'll be very happy to take questions more generally if you are interested in so as in studying the School of Finance and Management in particular and in any of the programs which I mentioned earlier hi Alberto yeah maybe maybe just see if anyone has any questions and then if not perhaps you can we can sort of look at doing the first option instead okay thank you Katie yes I'm very happy to still wait and pose for a few for a few seconds and otherwise if there is no further interest towards this topic or if you have any interest about any other topic you'd like to know more about what we cover in our programs I'm very very happy to talk otherwise if that's fine as I said earlier just as an overview I mentioned that we have a number of postgraduate programs within the School of Finance and Management that saw us and I'm very happy also to provide an overview concerning these these programs and just have a few slides here I will go through them very very quickly and I will leave enough time plenty of time if you have specific questions instead one of the MSc programs is the one on Accounting and Finance as the name says it has to do with this particular disciplines and you can possibly spot that they are on the slide but definitely you can have more information from the website the name of the course is the modules which are taught so there are core modules which include the dissertation which is a compulsory component for the program and you have a number of modules you can see they are the list they all have to do with Accounting and Finance of course taken at a certain advanced level because of these are possibly a number or the typical student in the MSc Accounting and Finance could already have a background in any of these disciplines you can also spot the logo of CIMA that charter the Institute of Management Accountants because part of the modules which are taken for the MSc also can be carried forward as a credit in order to get the CIMA qualification so you can get some exemptions. The second MSc is about International Financial Management so as the name says here it's about the marvelous, amazing domain we have nowadays in the world of the international financial system and flows so here we have a number of modules which are all concerned with specialist knowledge on financial management in the international setting bearing in mind the conditions of the real world business environment. Comvino of the program is Professor Victor Murinda he's the chairman of the Center for Global Finance within SOAS world known expert on such issues like financial inclusion but also very active also in other areas like for instance the rise of a fintech. In the MSc International Business we have here instead more of a focus on business and management of the company's enterprises rather than the domain of accounting and finance and here my colleague the Comvino Dr Juan Zhu she's an expert especially of Asian economies of China but apart from China this MSc International Business includes attention for a number of other geographical areas that we cover as you may well know SOAS as an institutional traditional expertise especially in Africa, Asia and the Middle East and the number of colleagues of mine have specialized knowledge on particular countries or regions in the world. And last and like also to mention the MSc public policy finance and management and the Comvino and the main trade is we're dealing with the public sector here so how public policies are made how they are implemented how public sector entities are managed how financial resources are managed how public governance works so the intertwining the relationship between governments public sector entities and entities in the private sector or a non-profit sector and hopefully in the previous presentation I could also provide a sense of a flavor of what is what is studied within public policy finance and management. So Katie and everyone it took as you could as you could see five more minutes just to provide this overview about the programs that we teach and at this stage if that's fine I pause again for for a few seconds just to wait if there are any questions. Sounds good thank you Albert so thanks for going over the overview I think that's really useful. Yeah let's just leave it a minute or two if anyone has any questions you can enter them into the chat or if you would prefer you can also unmute your microphone and speak to us that way and so yeah just leave a moment. Hello Anis I can see your line in chat I believe you may either switch on your microphone otherwise I wait if you prefer to type any question there in the chat all right so you applied to the MSc international finance and development which I believe belongs to another department if I'm correct if you're not going to try and help on the spot to see if I'm correct. Sorry Alberto yeah that is correct that's actually that's part of our economics department. Thank you thank you Katie it was just very quickly googling the name of this MSc just to remind me to which other department it belongs within within source I should say of course the different departments they may have a different intellectual orientation interest prefer the set of readings there is also a certain amount of overlap in between different disciplinary expertise and orientation and also colleagues in other department departments like economics or development studies they obviously pursue very interesting lines of inquiry concerning possibly matching and putting together some concern with the finance together with more specific concern for development. So if there are no questions as I believe my just very final line is to put there in the chat my email AA144 at source.ac.uk as I will be very happy to answer any questions you have or to help you find your way in the website or to find information you need before you fully understand what source is what we can offer and make a decision to apply. Well concerning scholarship Cristiana I'm not an expert in this area I can just say that within the source website there is a web page with which colleagues maintain consuming a number of scholarship schemes also for postgraduate students so the best they can do I believe is to bring your attention within the source website to these resources and Katie I believe either you are faster than me to suggest the web page to Cristiana otherwise I try and Google it and post these resources in the chat. I believe if we just Google source scholarships these must be the web pages thank you Katie it's the same one which which I found out of googling so there are a number of schemes of course a number of them could be open they're still open as I can see a few of them could be already closed just the point is to check if you qualify for them there may be restrictions depending on mission entity or other criteria. Thank you Alberto we can wrap this up slightly early if there's no further questions so thank you very much to yourself for the presentation and also to our attendees for coming along today. We do have a live chat session going on on the 13th of April and you can book that on our website and that is with our student recruitment team who will be able to answer more questions about scholarships fees and visas and accommodation and all those kind of questions before you start with us so I will just put the link to that in the chat before and before logging off um but other than that thank you so much and we'll thank you thank you Katie and everyone for staying with us for this time thank you thank you. Thanks bye