Projects/Where Does My Money Go/Data/Questions-about-data

Questions for Lisa meeting Franziska Kohler about CRA, and Ben Pearce about PESA, on Friday 5th Feb 2010.

Country Regional Analysis (CRA) Interview
The CRA is departmental spending broken down by the location that is affected by that spending.

I understand the way the geographic areas are classified using the 12 NUTS1 regions.

The projects seem to be selected by size of spending (over £1000).

What is not so clear to me is how the system used to classify the projects each government department allocates spending to. I would be very grateful if you could clarify this system.

So spending call fall into identifiable and non-identifiable.

Non-identifiable is where the effect is for the benefit of all -- for example defense.

Identifiable expenditure will fall into one of the following categories of spending: (point 17 in http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/d/cra_guidance_annexb.pdf)
 * current transfer payments (current grants and subsidies)
 * capital grants
 * spending on public services to individuals
 * spending on collective services (where most of this spending is delivered and consumed locally)
 * capital expenditure (capital formation)

The estimates for each departments spending are combined with (a) estimates of local authority spending by region from CLG and the devolved administrations, (b) data on spending by the devolved administrations and other departments with a single territory jurisdiction, to provide a full analysis of identifiable spending by country and region for UK public expenditure.

TODO make script to get just functions and subfunctions used in CRA.

Research sources for this interview:
 * main CRA page on Treasury website
 * The CRA (in csv)
 * A very breif overview of CRA
 * A more detailed guide to allocating identifiable spending
 * Shows the connections between COINS and the identifiable spending reported in the CRA
 * A sample CRA form that a government department would fill in

Public Expenditure Statistics Analysis (PESA) Interview
PESA is spending broken down by COFOG function and subfunction.

Would like to know how functions have changed over time, what system was used before COFOG post 2007?

How do you determine what spending comes under which COFOG categories?

Research sources for this interview
 * Introduction to PESA
 * PESA table 9 explained -- the spending by function and geographical region
 * PESA table 10 explained -- the spending by subfunction and geographical region
 * Differences between versions of PESA