Arab ministers concerned with Public Administration and Finance will gather this week for a three-day consultative meeting on ‘Public Administration and Public Accounting Development with Stress on Electronic Tools’, organized by the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA).
The meeting, which will be opened by Lebanese Administrative Development Minister Karim Pakradoni at the UN House, Beirut, aims to highlight the changing role of governments, and specifically of the public administrative process, and to identify major influencing forces contributing to this change.
The meeting also aims to increase awareness of the participants in public administration and public accounting issues. It will focus on the need to shift from the current accounting system to the accrual accounting and total economic resources concept, and promote the role of electronic tools in boosting the efficiency of administrative procedures.
Organized in cooperation with the Office of the Minister of State for Administrative Reform in Lebanon, the United Nations Division for Public Administration and Development Management (UN DPADM), the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (FES) and the Association for the Development of Informatics and Law in Lebanon (ADIL), the meeting is expected to discuss the development of public administration in theory and practice; the efforts undertaken world wide in government budget reforms and their applicability and constraints in ESCWA Member States; and the review of efforts undertaken in member states to enhance the efficiency of the public administration process.
Following the opening session, a joint press conference will be held by ESCWA Executive Secretary Mervat Tallawy and Minister Pakradoni to launch the ESCWA project on the Information Society Profile in the region. This project, which comes within the efforts of the UN Regional Commission in preparing Arab countries for the World Summit on the Information Society (Geneva, December 2003), aims to prepare basic profiles on the information society relating to Arab States. — (menareport.com)
© 2003 Mena Report (www.menareport.com)
