Federal Financial Management and Budgeting: NPR Recommendations and GAO Views

Of the 384 recommendations contained in the September 1993 National Performance Review (NPR) report, thirteen were concerned with “improving financial management” and eight dealt with “mission-driven, results-oriented budgeting.” The General Accounting Office (GAO), in response to requests from several members of the Congress, provided its views on each NPR recommendation and more recently completed a first-anniversary assessment of the extent of implementation.¹ In this article, the principal NPR themes and recommendations regarding financial management and budgeting, and GAO's comments about them, are summarized and discussed.     

From Performance Budgeting to Performance Budget Management: Theory and Practice

This article examines the decades‐long practices of performance budgeting in different countries and their associated challenges from a multilayered institutional framework. Based on theory and lessons learned, the article recommends an array of strategies to address institutional and organizational barriers. It also proposes to reconceptualize performance budgeting as a performance budget management system and suggests how multiyear budget planning, financial risk assessment, policy planning, the departmental budget cycle, the program budget cycle, stakeholder engagement, regular spending reviews, and performance audits should be integrated more closely to address the long‐term fiscal challenges faced by many governments and to respond to the public pressure on agencies to do more with less.     

Explaining Policy Responses to Danish and Irish Banking Failures during the Financial Crisis

The 2008 global financial crisis produced very different responses in Ireland and Denmark. While both countries embraced depositor guarantee schemes and recapitalisation programmes, these were designed and adopted in significantly different ways. Crucially, the Irish state initially assumed full responsibility for sector losses and only later defined terms for industry contributions. In Denmark, a negotiated settlement from the outset transferred most of the risk associated with banking failures collectively to the banking sector. The article assesses two explanations for these different responses: (1) variations in domestic exposure to the financial industry, notably its relative size, dominant business models and exposure to real estate markets and (2) variations in institutional features, notably banking sector preferences and legacies of collective action. While limited explanatory power can be attributed to the former, collaborative legacies decisively swayed policy responses in Denmark and Ireland in the hectic weeks of late September and early October 2008.     

The Office of Management and Budget in a Changing Scene

Authors' Note: It is too early to provide a definitive view and appraisal of the Office of Management and Budget in the Reagan presidency. The discussion that follows is based partly on current and recent articles and a few recent monographs and books, many of which are credited in footnotes. In additon we have relied upon a considerable number of interviews with current participants and alumni of OMB as well as with some observers from outside. It would be impracticable to list those who helped us, but we are grateful to all of them. The substance of this article was completed in mid-July 1982.     

The Neoconservative Critiques of and Reconciliation with Capitalism

The neoconservatives have fallen out of favor among Washington policy-makers under President Obama as well as among conservatives themselves. However, neoconservatives’ impact on contemporary political discourse remains significant. This article is about the evolution of neoconservatives’ thinking about capitalism. Specifically, it is about neoconservatives’ ideological journey from right-wing critics of capitalism to one of its most ardent defenders. At the heart of their writing about capitalism are two distinct, but related cultural critiques of capitalism. In their view, capitalism creates a culture that is decadent, effeminate, and preoccupied with immediate gratification. This culture threatens the Protestant ethic and the heroic virtues of patriotic self-sacrifice. The Protestant ethic legitimizes capitalist accumulation and inequality, while the heroic virtues made the US a global superpower. Through supply-side economics and American empire the neoconservatives sought to recover both, the cultural foundations of capitalism located in the Protestant ethic and the heroic virtues of a global superpower. Neoconservative writings on capitalism are key to understanding the shift in the discourse on the economy, the welfare state, and foreign policy over the last thirty years.     

The Role of Budget and Financial Reform in Making Government Work Better and Cost Less

Budgeting and Financial Management play a crucial role in organizing and disciplining the federal management culture. Consequently, addressing improvements in their practice is essential in the National Performance Review's examination of government-wide management systems. This article briefly describes the recommendations and anticipated implementing actions relating to budgeting and financial management within the context of the National Performance Review's themes of cutting red tape, putting customers first, empowering employees to get results, and cutting back to basics. External factors, such as innovations in private sector management practices, rapid changes in information technology, and statutory reforms such as the Government Performance and Results Act, also influence needed changes in budgetary and financial management practices.     

Federal Financial Management Reform and The Chief Financial Officers Act

This study analyzes the development of financial management reform in the federal government. A series of reform initiatives culminated in passage of the Chief Financial Officers (CFO) Act that prescribes a wide spectrum of changes in federal accounting, budgeting, and financial reporting. The CFO Act may well be the most significant executive branch federal financial management reform since the adoption of the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921.     

Do Politicians Listen to Experts? The Budget Enforcement Act of 1990 and The Capacity to Budget

Last year offered a unique opportunity to compare the ideas of experts and politicians. The 1990 Budget Enforcement Act changed the federal budget process. Allen Schick's 1990 book, The Capacity to Budget, included ideas on how to improve budgeting at the federal level. A comparison is made between the new law and the new ideas in several areas of the budgetary process: deficit reduction; resource rationing; adjustment to changing expenditures; increasing budget honesty; decreasing conflict; rou-tinizing the process; integrating the parts of the budget; and balancing claims and resources.     

Organization and Reporting of Public Financial Accounts: Insights and Policy Implications from the Singapore Budget

This paper analyses the Singapore government budget's organization and reporting structure, and draws lessons and policy implications for improving public financial management practices. The paper finds that Singapore's fiscal marksmanship record has been poor with consistent underestimates of revenue and overestimates of expenditure. Second, subtle divergences from international reporting standards limit the information available and constrain the budget's analytical usefulness in international comparisons. Third, current reporting conventions of the budget fail to provide an adequate representation of the government's fiscal position. Fourth, revised estimates of budgetary balances in line with international reporting standards show a considerable increase in the fiscal space available. The policy implications of these findings are discussed, as well as some reporting changes which can help improve the fiscal marksmanship record, increase public sector transparency and accountability, and facilitate better quality discourse among all stakeholders on public financial management.     

The Evolution of the Office of Management and Budget Under President Reagan

This article introduces a series of retrospective articles on the Reagan administration. The Office of Management and Budget became a major actor in the budget debate over the last eight years. The Reagan administration has seen a change in OMB's role from that of an advisor to the president, to an agency with a central role to play in the development of the president's foreign and domestic policy within budgetary constraints. The article focuses on how OMB has reacted to these changes producing budget conventions and techniques unique to the 1980s.     

预算绩效循证管理:概念诠释与实现路径

预算绩效目标管理在绩效目标设定与评审、指标设计等方面存在缺陷。循证管理与绩效管理都是以提升效率和效能为目标,强调绩效信息的生产和使用。但是,循证管理使用的绩效信息来源更广,管理工具和流程不同,更能体现民主意涵,因此,被视为预算绩效目标管理必要的、有益的补充,有助于提升全面实施预算绩效管理的科学性和实效性。循证实践代表了政府绩效管理的发展趋势,作为一个新的概念性框架,预算绩效循证管理内容包括问题识别、证据生成与评估、项目介绍与执行、绩效评价与改进等。推行策略可开展局部试点,强化共识,缩小研究与实践的鸿沟,建立健全组织与制度保障等。     

The Vision of Federal Financial Management

This article provides a definition of what "good financial management" means in the respective local, state, and federal arenas and highlights some successful efforts of financial management improvement. Furthermore, eight evaluative criteria for assessing financial management performance developments are suggested and illustrated through current federal examples.     

Judicious Incentives: International Public Policy Responses to the Globalization of Environmental Management

Public policymakers and regulators worldwide are grappling with the desire to improve environmental quality through appropriate regulation of business, while also streamlining government. Concurrently, environmentally conscience consumers are calling for improved environmental performance by industry. As a result of these pressures, regulators and lawmakers worldwide are attempting to craft effective policies that create adequate incentives for environmental protection on the part of firms, in the face of decreasing budgets and an increased demand for the use of market‐based incentives. To aid decision makers as they struggle with these concerns, this study provides a detailed case examination of the dilemmas and responses of national‐level regulators as they try to develop appropriate responses to the rise of international and “voluntary” management regimes. To accomplish these goals, this article compares the public policy responses of governments around the world to one such voluntary international environmental regime: ISO 14001. ISO 14001 is a form of industry self‐regulation in response to market forces calling for harmonization in environmental management and as a result of consumer and trade‐partner demands. This study examines the relationships between regulators and the regulated in order to understand if ISO 14001 certified firms are receiving regulatory relief or other forms of public policy/regulatory benefits as a result of their certification. It will also examine the impact that government incentives (or their absence) are having on the certification decisions of firms around the world. This information helps us to begin to understand how the trends toward smaller government and voluntary environmental regimes are affecting one another.     

Public Budget Choices and Private Willingness to Pay

Efficient allocation of public funds depends upon good information about citizens' values. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how citizens' values can be obtained by eliciting marginal willingness to tradeoff (MWTTO) ratios for public spending categories and linking these ratios to individual, private willingness to pay. The link enables estimation of the willingness to pay for an expansion to any of the budget categories based on the elicited willingness to pay and the marginal willingness to tradeoff ratios. Tradeoff ratios and willingness to pay are estimated for public budget categories in Kentucky based on a representative sample surveyed by mail and the web in 2007. Estimates show that individuals are willing to pay the most for an expansion to educational services, followed by health care.