Budgeting information resources: Some alternative approaches

As concern over public sector efficiency and effectiveness has grown, attention has turned to budgetingressurces not heretofore budgeted well. This paper foctlses upon one such resource--the information resource--and examines implications for the improvement of public services and management decisions. In the pas:, managers have not viewed information as a resource to be managed as we have human and financial resources. With the rapid growth of information technology and its increasing use, we are becoming more aware of the costs of information and the need to budget for information services. We argue that information resources should be visible, traceable and chargeable. Alternative styles of decision making/budgeting are identified built around two methods of information use: one is called the input-oriented approach, the other, the output-oriented approach. The input-oriented approach is based upon the concept of incrementalism while the output-oriented approach reflects the rationalistic decision style. These approaches are further broken down into four modes of budgeting information resources. The characteristics of each of these modes are identified, analyzed and problems discussed.     

Russian Central Government Budgeting and Public Sector Reform Discourses: Paradigms,Hybrids, and a “Third Way”

ABSTRACT

This study explores how public sector reform discourses are reflected in Russian central government budgeting. Through the lenses of institutional logics, Russian central government budgeting is considered to be a social institution that is influenced by rivaling reform paradigms: Public Administration, New Public Management (NPM), the Neo-Weberian State, and New Public Governance. Although NPM has dominated the agenda during the last decade, all four have been presented in “talks” and “decisions” regarding government budgeting. The empirical evidence illustrates that the implementation of management accounting techniques in the Russian public sector has coincided with and contradicted the construction of the Russian version of bureaucratic governance, which is referred to as the vertical of power. Having been accompanied by participatory mechanisms and a re-evaluation of the Soviet legacy, the reforms have created prerequisites for various outcomes at the level of budgeting practices: conflicts, as in the UK, and hybridization, as in Finland.     

Policy Diffusion and Performance-based Budgeting

This article applied the policy diffusion model as a theoretical framework for interpreting the international spread of performance-based budgeting, based upon 33 OECD case studies of countries that have implemented this reform. The data show that the historical development of performance-based budgeting was fairly consistent with the diffusion model. In particular, the adoption of performance budgeting took off during 1985–1995 and then accelerated over the following 15 years, and the primary innovators were a group of four English-speaking countries with comparatively laissez-faire economies (the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand). The case studies indicated that performance-based budgeting was generally part of a broader program of governmental reform, that executive agencies were more important than parliaments in managing it, that it became quite important in budget- and policy-making, and that implementing it faced a significant number of challenges.     

Citizen participation and the redistribution of public goods

This study investigates whether citizen participation in public budgeting resulted in increased redistributive outcomes when compared with bureaucratic decision‐making. We focused on a specific budget item (i.e., the installation of surveillance cameras for crime prevention) and examined whether participatory budgeting yielded larger budget allocations to low‐income neighbourhoods. Results indicate that such participatory budgeting results in larger budget allocations for low‐income neighbourhoods when compared with allocations produced by bureaucratic budgeting practices. The results also indicate that budgets allocated through citizen participation may be no more or even less effective for advancing public goals. These findings suggest a potential trade‐off between equity and public service effectiveness. Citizen participation improves budget equity, but may be less effective for achieving public goals than bureaucratic decision‐making. To explain this, we offer the ‘social pressure hypothesis’, which posits that social pressure during public‐forum discussions can influence participating citizens to make redistributive decisions.     

A cultural theory of budgeting

My aim is to bring together various strands of thought about the relationship between cultures and budgets into a single essay. Cultural theory is a way to bring what different people want and why they want it into budgeting. If cultures are conqruent with budgetary processes, this symmetry should show up in the standard topics of the subject. Thus I shall deal with the form of budgeting, auditing, budgetary balance, and deficits. I shall also examine the place of the budgetary base—agreed understandings on totals and items—among the political cultures. Finally, I shall provide a cultural explanation for the growth of government.     

Planning,Budgeting, and Health Care Performance in Ukraine

Abstract

The Government of Ukraine has not pursued health care reforms now commonplace in the rest of Europe and Central/Eastern Europe that rely less upon centralized, state delivery of services and more on decentralized operational responsibilities and competition for services that increase patient choice. The Ukrainian health sector suffers from personnel overspecialization and facility overcapacity, resulting in high-cost, low productivity services. Budget funds are unavailable for operations and maintenance resulting in poor quality services. The state provides health care as a constitutionally-protected monopoly, relying on the traditional command and control model which ignores cost/quality competition options and responsibilities to patients. Overall, the system which produces these results is over-centralized, requiring achievement of physical service norms without providing sufficient funds. The centralized system does not monitor or evaluate services beyond narrow financial accountability and control requirements. The health care system is paradoxically over-centralized but unable to regulate or control local health care official decisions to ensure compliance with national standards. Needed are reforms in the health care policy and operational areas to produce the supply of services needed for national economic recovery. In the short-term, the budgetary framework can be improved as an operational/management guide through development of comparative information on results. Most of this information can be based on the economic classification consistent with the chart of accounts. Funding stability can be increased to improve expenditure control by implementing a new fiscal transfer formula that provides discretion (i.e., block grants) and performance criteria (i.e., outcome measures). In the medium-term, building on the technical foundation of physical norms and statistical reporting, the health care budgeting and financial management system should shift emphasis to: program planning, policy and management analysis, and public communications. The results of these reforms should lead to decentralized health care operations, service analysis, and delivery responsibilities. At the same time, the reforms should lead to proper centralization of responsibilities for strategic policy decisions, safety regulation, national standards, and program evaluation.     

No staff,no time,no money: Can budget reform work in a rural county?

Budget reforms directed toward providing more information and analysis for management and policy making appear to be most widely used by larger jurisdictions. Reforms such as performance budgeting, program budgeting, and zero based budgeting are associated with professionalism, management information systems, budget staffs, and a lengthy budget preparation and planning phase. This article addresses the question of whether it is possible to implement budget reform without the staff and financial resources that so often goes hand-in-hand with it. The experience of one rural county government in attempting budget reform is examined.     

Efficacy,effectiveness and efficiency in human resource use: A primer on the three e's

Disputes over resource use, particularly in the public sector, often stem from conflict over what is “efficient.” This paper systematizes and critiques the most frequently encountered efficiency notions, focusing on their their use and misuse in making human resource decisions. The conclusion is drawn that a triad comprising technical, cost, and allocative efficiency is the base upon which decisions ultimately must be founded if the aim is to obtain the most value from available resources. A corollary is that other conceptions mislead more often than clarify.

Technical efficiency requires getting the most from inputs; there must be no way to obtain greater output from those we are using. It underpins cost efficiency, which requires using the production technique that sacrifices least value from other outputs foregone. Allocative efficiency demands that resources cannot be redirected to produce outputs of higher value and in turn has both technical and cost efficiency as necessary preconditions.

Allocative efficiency is by far the most problematic. Few economists object to the Pareto principle, which states that resources are being misused if redeploying inputs or redistributing outputs can yield added benefits for some members of society without harming any others. However, it is rare to find real-world cases that simple and even when it can be applied, the approach risks biasing policy toward piecemeal methods when broader perspectives may be called for. The Kaldor-Hicks approach in part overcomes these limitations, but at a price. Since it sanctions what may be substantial income redistribution, willingness to accept its implications is much less certain.     

Eight supreme court cases that have changed the face of public administration

This article examines eight recent Supreme Court decisions that have important implications for public administrators. The areas examined include public personnel policy, solid waste management, budgeting and finance, taxation, privacy, and public school education.     

Budgeting,policy and administration: patterns and dynamics in the U.S

This article examines the relationships between policy, administration, and budgeting I argue that the administration of government is directly and primarily influenced by changes in policy and budgeting. A conceptual framework of the interrelationship between these three factors is presented. This framework is applied to Schick's classic periodicization of twentieth century U.S. history. Three value orientations of budgeting—control, management, and planning—were evident at different times during these periods. The framework is then applied to the period since 1981, labeled a phase of limitation. This phase has been an unhealthy development in American government.     

Cultural Resistance,Output Measures,and Audit Practice: Impact on Non-Implementation of Program-Based Budgeting in Nigeria

Excessive spending on recurrent expenditure hampers economic growth. A program-based budgeting approach has been proposed to discipline fiscal excesses of agencies outside direct civil service machinery but government is inactive. This study hypothesized that difficulty in securing output measures, resistance from politicians, agency heads, and workers; current audit practice; and cost–benefit considerations, hinder implementation. Analysis of perceptual data reveals that resistance from politicians and employees is the major factor that hinders implementation of a program-based budgeting in Nigeria. In addition, difficulty in securing measures to quantify outputs thwarts implementation initiatives, and current audit practice whereby private audit firms audit operational activities of agencies only at year-end subvert program reviews. The study recommends that politicians be advised on political considerations in budgetary allocation; a performance measurement committee be set up to develop measures of outputs acceptable to workers; and a body of auditors be nationalized to undertake audit of government agencies.     

The boom-bust cycle in wyoming county spending: Implications for budget theories

This paper presents a case study of county spending in Wyoming during the 1970s and 1980s to test the applicability of several competing perspectives upon budget policy derived from higher level and more visible governments in the United States. Our findings about the consequences of Wyoming's boom and bust cycle during the 1970s and 1980s for county finances possess several implications for the competing theories of budget policy.

Concerning how budgets are made, they confirm the growing consensus that models of “budgetary incrementalism” are inadequate, as well as providing some evidence consistent with the “garbage can” model of decision-making. However, they also suggest that “the baby should not be thrown out with the bath water,” since temporal consistency and incrementalism are evident in several areas. Turning to the factors affecting budget substance, resource base turned out to be the most important factor influencing Wyoming county budgets. Several instances of special social needs and political leanings could be discerned as well. However, most of these also suggested that resource constraints were the principal driving force behind county budgeting in Wyoming.     

Useful,But Not A Panacea: Performance-Based Program Budgeting in Florida

Abstract

Florida's performance-based budgeting reform, called performance-based program budgeting or PB², followed a defined plan of implementation from its inception in 1995. The reform's implementation was perhaps more interesting for its dynamic adjustments than its planned progression, however. At various points along the reform trajectory key entities charged with driving the reform process had to deal with challenges to both the substance of reform and its day-to-day management. This article presents some of the story of this process. PB² has not proved a panacea for all the budgeting woes governments like Florida's may face, but it has been useful and the story of its implementation should be of interest.     

War,Violence and the Making of the Stalinist State: A Tillyian Analysis

Abstract

Defining the state as ‘organised violence’, based on the emergence of the modern European national state system, Charles Tilly identified four essential war-driven, state-building activities: ‘war-making’; ‘state-making’; ‘protection’ of elite ‘clients’; and ‘extraction’ of resources. Drawing on Tilly's primary categories of analysis, this essay considers the ways in which war, or the threat of war, real or imagined, shaped the Soviet state, particularly in its Stalinist manifestation. This essay argues that Tilly's warfare-state paradigm, judiciously deployed, brings into high relief facets of Soviet state-making that few other paradigms do.     

Contract Budgeting

Contract budgeting attempts to reconfigure public budgeting as a system of purchase contracts between provider agencies and central government. It draws its inspiration from a simple model of contract in which the purchaser buys clearly specified outputs from a provider at a preagreed price. Contract budgeting thus represents a fusion of output-based budgeting schemas with the newer enthusiasm for placing the public sector on a 'market' footing. This paper reviews the problems which confront any form of output based budgeting, and then analyses the specific issues of contractualization. It concludes that contract budgeting does not well fit the realities of budgeting in a complex public sector.     

Strategic budgeting: Reviewing the literature of an emerging theory

Among all the public management functions, the budget process comes closest to the scenarios pictured in the literature of strategic management and game theory. Unfortunately there has been very little written on the strategic aspects of public budgeting. Generally, writers on strategic management view budgeting as a secondary-level operation functioning as a means of implementing the strategic goals of the organization. Much of the public budgeting literature, however, suggests that budgeting serves a broader function, often helping to determine agency objectives as well as serving to implement objectives defined at top (usually political) levels. In this article the writer argues that strategic management in public agencies must be defined differently from the definition used for that process in private firms. The literature of strategic management and budgeting is reviewed in an effort to clarify the relationship between these two public management functions.     

Was There a Soviet Nationality Policy?

Abstract

The essay challenges the frequent references to the concept of Soviet nationality policy by historians and social scientists. The argument proceeds, first, by unpicking some of the logic in the use of the term; second, by examining the evidence for the existence and nature of such a policy; and third, by considering alternative explanations for major decisions and events concerning non-Russian nationalities in the Soviet Union. The essay concludes that, at least after the 1920s, there was no Soviet nationality policy, and the processes of negotiation and nation-promoting practices pursued by republic leaders were, instead, the key influences on decision-making.     

Professionalism and public administration: A bibliography

Abstract

This paper tests public budgeting to ascertain if it has both a long‐run equilibrium and short‐run incremental process. In the model, the decision‐maker strives to achieve budgetary balance over the long‐run but is constrained in the short‐run and follows incremental decision‐making. The interaction between expenditures and revenues, along with several control variables, is tested for each of the Canadian provinces using data between 1961 and 2000. The results show that in the long‐run, expenditures force the budget toward balance in all the provinces with the exception of British Columbia. In that province, there was a fiscal synchronization of revenues and expenditures working in combination. In the short‐run, incrementalism occurs in nine of the ten provinces.     

Crisis,containment and development: the role of the landmine impact survey

This article sets out to explain the Landmine Impact Survey, implemented by the Survey Action Center (sac), which is led by a consortium of mine action organisations. The primary rationale of the survey lies in the need to root mine action priority decisions in a firm understanding of the impact that landmines have upon communities. Data from four countries in which impact surveys have been completed indicate that only a small share of communities—perhaps as few as 10%—can be categorised as high impact, another 25% as medium impact, and the remaining 65% as low impact. This has implications for the prioritisation of scarce mine action resources, but it also makes broad elimination of the impact of landmines within the dates specified by the Landmines Convention appear more realistic, even though total clearance may appear unrealistic. The article places the impact survey initiative in the context of the evolution of a humanitarian response to landmines, from an emerging realisation of the threat in the 1970s and 1980s to the present-day landmine response capacity working with other reconstruction and development initiatives. The success of the sector ultimately hinges on the availability of solid and systematic data on impact.     

Types of budgeting and budgeting problems in aclerican cities

This research investigates the types of budgeting formats used in over 200 United States cities and provides information about the budgetary problems facing American cities. The perception of budgeting problems differs significantly among cities with different types of budgeting. Cities using line-item budgeting are more likely to view the problems as more severe than do the cities using reform budgeting. The problems are the least severe in cities using planning, programming budgeting.