"Burundi has made tremendous progress over the past few years, including: the approval of the new Constitution in 2005, emphasizing the principles of power sharing and local development; the successful management of two rounds of democratic elections in 2005 and 2010’; and the creation of stable macroeconomic environment, which encouraged rebuilding of core public sector institutions. Despite these achievements, the report notes that economic growth remains weak and GSP rates are below expectations. Burundi is therefore vulnerable to different sources of risks conspiring to create a ‘fragility trap’ into which the economy can fall. Chief amongst them are: (i) food price volatility linked to international markets and climatic conditions: (ii) oil prices that affect the import bill of the country; (iii) high level of dependency on aid inflows; (iv) low budget execution capacity, coupled with weak state effectiveness and under-performing public institutions; (v) constraints on productive activity and a highly concentrated export profile; and (vi) enduring risks of political and social instability linked to the return of refugees and its impact on land conflicts and security threats. In this context, the main objectives of this Public Expenditure Review is to assist the Government in its efforts to escape fragility by focusing on two important and complementary themes: (i) creating adequate fiscal space to reduce the impact of future shocks; and (ii) using the available fiscal space to improve public expenditure management and promote government effectiveness. Building on these topics, the report emphasizes six key messages : (i) Burundi has a narrow fiscal space given the structure of its public expenditures, composed mainly of salaries and transfers; (ii) the country should mobilize additional domestic revenues to increase its fiscal space; (iii) the role of donors in supporting effective management of public expenditures remain critical and can also be the source of additional fiscal stress, especially when budget support arrives late in a fiscal year; (iv) accessing high quality budget data remains a challenge due to major incoherencies between data from the Treasury database and data published by SIGEFI; (v) the aid management is not properly integrated into budget execution process; (vi) it is advisable to adopt realistic and pragmatic solutions to improve the performance of the public administration, while keeping the wage bill under control. "