Fiscal Forecasting to Support Public Sector Human Resource Planning in European Countries

Fiscal constraints can affect the affordability of public-sector workforce plans, but aggregate fiscal data do not identify staffing requirements. In this exploratory study, we examine whether historical revenue and expenditure shares jointly explain cross-country variation in their 2018 values and discuss a possible connection to personnel budgeting. We estimate two ordinary least-squares regressions using 28 countries belonging to the European Union in 2018 as observations, with nine annual fiscal shares from 2009–2017 as predictors. The data are percentages of GDP from a fixed Eurostat publication vintage, extracted by Eurostat on 12 May 2019. The revenue and expenditure specifications are jointly significant, with R² = 0.995248 and 0.976869, respectively. These results describe in-sample fit; we did not evaluate forecasting accuracy on independent data. Severe multicollinearity, the small sample, and influential expenditure observations constrain interpretation. In our proposed HRM framework, we link fiscal scenarios to approved personnel allocations and then to costed workforce options. We explain this connection through an illustrative example, but we do not empirically test the framework because the dataset contains no payroll, employment, vacancy, or service-demand indicators. Practical use therefore requires independent forecast validation and institution-specific financial and workforce information.