Search

Old-age pensions are the most widespread social security programmes around the world that in many countries account for a huge part of the national budget. Based on the PENLEG dataset (Pension Legi...

This article investigates the effects of performance-based budgeting (PBB) adoption on the spending of the central government in eleven Asian countries over an 18-year period. The theoretical argum...

After experiencing a lack of political interest for financial and performance information in the Dutch House of Representatives, the author, a member of parliament, introduced a systematic approach for parliamentarians to review the country’s national budget and accounts. Drawing on corporate experience, the approach is a parliamentary version of a corporate audit committee working with a standardized review questionnaire. It gained wide support and is now used by several parliamentary committees. Nevertheless, the author raises various questions to the public accounting and control research community to improve the method and ensure its long-term use by politicians.

Every developed country other than the United States offers parental leave for mothers and fathers paid out of the national budget. The authors say the payments directly reduce child poverty. Is it too costly for the United States? These two economists think not.

Recent research suggests that the Chilean Congress is marginalised in the policymaking process, especially when setting the budget. This paper argues that previous studies have overlooked the fact that the legislature uses two amendment tools – specifications and marginal notes – to increase the national budget and reallocate resources within ministries. This behaviour contradicts the constitution, which only allows Congress to reduce the executive's budget bill. To test this empirically, a pooled two-stage time-series cross-sectional analysis is conducted on ministries for the years 1991–2010. The findings clarify how the legislature surpasses its constitutional limits and demonstrate that specifications are useful to predict when Congress increases or decreases a ministry's budget.

How do ministry of Finance (MOF) bureaucrats preserve their dominance in the national budget process? As we all know, MOF bureaucrats are important in politics and policy, we know much less about exactly how they play their role. Political analysis of the interaction between politicians and bureaucrats in the Israeli healthcare policy arena reveals asymmetry of information in favour of the bureaucrats at the MOF. Among others, this asymmetry is also due to a lack of transparency in the national budgeting process. While presenting the balance of power between the players in the Israeli health policy arena, we point to the MOF bureaucrats as the most dominant players – though their power is not absolute as it always seems. Quite a few indications point at ‘non-democratic’ strategies made by these bureaucrats in their interactions with the other players. The empirical findings show that alongside bureaucrats' expertise, strategies based on concealment, manipulation in presentation of information, lack of tra...

Not many countries have experienced as fast a growth in the number of local governments as has present day Indonesia. This study examines how territorial splits under new decentralisation policy have effected local development. The paper also critically discusses what needs to change and improve in decentralisation policy to encourage local development. Territorial splits have reinforced spatial fragmentation and ‘local selfishness’, hindering rather than driving local development. Territorial splits have also been a substantial additional burden to the national budget, and have resulted in many conflicts, disputes and tensions at the local level. This paper recommends that there should be a comprehensive review into the practice of territorial splits and suggests that there is a need to make regional mergers a more attractive option for the efficient and effective provision of public services at the local level.

This paper analyses Spanish infrastructure policy since the early 1700s: road building in the eighteenth century, railway creation and expansion in the nineteenth, motorway expansion in the twentieth, and high speed rail development in the twenty-first. The analysis reveals a long-term pattern, in which infrastructure policy in Spain has been driven not by the requirements of commerce and economic activity, but rather by the desire to centralise transportation around the country's political capital. As commerce has been unable to sustain the development of this policy, regulation and subsidies from the national budget have regularly been used to decide the priorities regarding infrastructure creation and to fund the development, maintenance, and operation of the networks. When high roads, bridges, canals, etc. are in this manner made and supported by the commerce which is carried on by means of them, they can be made only where that commerce requires them, and consequently where it is proper to make them....

For much of the First Republic, the Italian parliament was notorious for its fiscal irresponsibility. However, using data over a 20-year period we note that the performance of the parliament during the passage of the national budget changed over time. During most of the 1980s the parliament always spent more than the final amount specified in the government's Budget Bill. But this trend slowed towards the late 1980s, and of particular interest is that for several years during the 1990s the parliament actually voted to spend less than the government had originally proposed. We explain this anomaly using institutional theories and contextual explanations.

The paper is concerned with the interrelationship between the national budget, the role of the State in the economy and the public financial situation existing during different historical periods beginning with the unification of Italy. The paper examines the functions of the national budget during the Liberal, Corporatist and Republican periods, and how these have changed as a result of institutional changes, and developments in the socio-economic situation which have influenced economic policy. We focus particularly on the public accountancy reform of 1923–1924 which, in combination with administrative reform, contained some important innovations. The system that emerged is found to have been clearly connected with that of the previous period, the innovations being based on the tenets of liberal ideology and the efficiency of the public administration. In this context the centralisation of the General Accounting Office in 1923 is seen as the result of actions begun during an earlier period. On ...

Recent national budget shortfalls in the United States have caused many states to evaluate various ways to cut their budgets—including cutting education expenditures—while community college enrollments have continued to explode. The combination of these 2 factors threatens the traditional open door policy of public community colleges.

This article examines how surges of female representation have produced gender patterns in standing committees and affected the financial support for “women's policy” in the Norwegian and Swedish national legislatures. The argument is two-fold. The more women there were in the Riksdag and the Storting, the more likely they were initially to end up on a “female” standing committee. Second, as the ratio of women legislators grew, spending on “families and children” in the national budget plummeted in both countries, only to acquire more prominence as the proportion of women legislators reached more than one fourth. The article begins with an extensive critical analysis of the gender-theoretical assumptions of the women and legislatures literature, suggesting that contemporary feminist scholarship that assumes gender to be malleable and contextual is more fruitful.

Intended to lighten the burden on the national budget, military enterprises spawned corruption and sapped military discipline. But who will pay the soldiers now?

Many of the tensions and divides in the Middle East, centered on Kuwait in the Gulf War, continue, and the West remains in‐extricably linked to the list of possible methods of prevention and solutions. However, West‐ern attention is also captured by other global trouble spots and by national budget deficits which limit military spending, leaving, argues the author, a gap in the defence of Kuwait and Middle Eastern security as a whole, which could be filled by Brigades of Gurkhas who are themselves facing redundancy after the return of Hong Kong to China in 1997. British troops will never be stationed in Kuwait permanently, and, by using the Gurkhas who would be culturally less obtrusive than their British counterparts, and paid for by Kuwait, tripartite relations will be enhanced, and the security of the region more certain.

This article investigates how housing and housing policy in the Netherlands developed in a period of economic and demographic stagnation (1974–1984). It is argued that there have been some policy adjustments, but that the housing sector has been able to hold its own reasonably well in the political arena. Public spending on housing as a percentage of the national budget since 1978 has risen. This is the result of the strong position of the interest groups in the non‐profit rent sector and — above all ‐of reasons situated outside housing itself: unemployment in the building trade, the relation between rent policy and incomes policy and the economic importance of urban restructuring processes. Housing held its own for non‐housing reasons.

What is a final budget? Why is it necessary to draft and audit the national budget, and what is the best way to do it? These meaningful questions are closely connected with our public finance work in the future, our grasp of the objective laws of development of socialist reconstruction, and our generalization of experience in fiscal work. The purpose of this paper is therefore to make a preliminary study of these problems.

The term “full-employment program” usually means a program designed to maintain the general demand for labor. Unemployment can be reduced by such a program only to a certain point; beyond that point an increase in the general demand for labor will be relatively ineffective and will have undesirable repercussions. In setting a goal for a full-employment program we are essentially expressing a judgment on how far we can safely go in reducing unemployment by increasing general demand. In translating this judgment into figures, the best guide is our historical experience. The essence of a full-employment program is the coordination of a multitude of governmental activities to achieve a quantitative result. This requires that the goal, initially expressed in employment terms, be translated into a comprehensive national budget. The construction of such a budget requires essentially the identification and projection of causally significant relationships. For this purpose, the primary statistical need is...