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A national budget needs funding with the sources being either domestic or foreign. Foreign sources of funding seem to dominate the Kenyan context. This paper argues that a country with a national budget dependent on foreign aid can be held hostage by the holders of the purse strings. Further, that this dependency has a negative impact on Kenya’s economic sovereignty. It is this impact that is of relevance to this paper. In this spirit the paper critically analyses Kenya’s borrowing trend with a special focus on foreign aid, defines by use of a working definition the importance of economic sovereignty, explores how this borrowing trend affects Kenya’s economic sovereignty and offers solutions on regaining of Kenya’s economic sovereignty.

This paper inquires the following research question that “to what extent, do election years have explanatory power to predict central and local governmental administrative units’ budget deficits in electoral districts?” Theoretically, this research’s theoretical part utilizes the electoral budget cycle approach that government party/parties increase(s) budgetary expenditures and decrease(s) taxation before the elections for re-election prospect. This paper’s arguments are twofold. First, classic electoral budget cycle disregards temporal order in elections that between two first-order elections (general elections in parliamentary systems and presidential elections in presidential systems), there are second-order elections (local elections at the district/province/city level in parliamentary systems and legislative elections in presidential systems). Second, the classic electoral budget cycle approach deals with a monolithic conception of the incumbent party in parliamentary democracies such that there is no distinction between single party majoritarian and coalition government. Methodologically, this research employs time-series cross-section data and resorts to fixed-effects model. This paper compiles a new dataset on local government spending-revenue for all Turkish municipalities and special provincial administrations at the district level from Turkish Statistical Institute library’s scanned archive documents and on incumbent candidate and party (re-)election between 1980 and 2007 in general elections. Findings can be compartmentalized into three. Firstly, there are electoral budget cycles in both general and local elections. Secondly, government type matters in electoral budget cycles due to clarity of the fiscal responsibility. Thirdly, there are electoral credit cycles in agriculture and real estate to supplement electoral budget deficits.

ÖZET PARLEMENTER VE BAŞKANLIK SİSTEMLERİNİN BÜTÇE AÇIKLARININ DÜŞÛRÜLMESİNDEKİ YETKİNLİKLERİNİN KARŞILAŞTIRILMASI HÜSEYİN ÇA?RI SA?LAM Yüksek Lisans Tezi, İktisat Bölümü Tez Yöneticisi : Y. Doç. Dr. İzak Atiyas Temmuz 1997 Siyasi kurumlar, hükümetin, stratejik kararlar vererek, ekonomi politikaları belirleme ve uygulama yetisini etkiler. Siyasi kurumlar hakkındaki seçimlerin en önemlilerinden biri, devletin yönetim sisteminin, parlementer sistem veya başkanlık sistemi olmasıyla ilgilidir. Bu tez, devletin yönetim sisteminde yapılan seçimin, bütçe açığının düşürülmesi hedefi üzerine etkisini tartışmaktadır. Bu hedefe ulaşmak için, hükümetlerin üç yetiye gereksinim duydukları belirlenmiştir: `Çelişen seçenekler arasından öncelikli olanları saptayabilme`, `siyasi gruplara ekonomik yaptırımlar uygulayabilme` ve `kaynakların etkin kullanımım sağlayabilme`. Her iki sistemin siyasi karar yapılan ele alınmakta, ve bu yapıların, bütçe açıklarını düşürmede gerekliliği belirlenen hükümet yetileri üzerindeki etkileri incelenmektedir. Anahtar Sözcükler : Parlementer Sistem, Başkanlık Sistemi. ABSTRACT A COMPARISON OF THE POLICY EFFECTIVENESS OF PARLIAMENTARY AND PRESIDENTIAL SYSTEMS IN REDUCING BUDGET DEFICITS HÜSEYİN ÇA?RI SA?LAM M.A. IN ECONOMICS Supervisor: Assist. Prof. İzak Atiyas July 1997 Political institutions, affect the policymaking capabilities of the government. These capabilities influence the governments' ability to make strategic policy choices that will help them in reaching their policy objectives. One of the most important choice of political institutions is the system of government, that is, whether it is parliamentary or presidential. This thesis discusses how the choice of system of government affects the ability of reaching the policy objective of reducing budget deficit. It examines the decisionmaking attributes of the two systems and the impact of these attributes on specific capabilities required to reduce budget deficits, namely, `ability to set and maintain priorities among many conflicting demands`, `ability to impose losses on powerful groups`, and `ability to allocate resources effectively`. Keywords: Parliamentary System, Presidential System. 64

You know, the President is elected to lead. --Speaker John Boehner (R-OH, Epstein 2011) ... we're still waiting for the president to lead. --Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY, Calmes 201 la) [Obama's FY 2012 budget proposal] ... it's what I call an abdication of leadership --Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI, Allen and Allen 2011) ... if you look at the history of how these [budget] deals get done, typically it's not because there's an Obama plan out there; it's because Democrats and Republicans are both committed to tackling this issue in a serious way. --Pres. Barack Obama (U.S. White House 2011b) Introduction: Presidential Place in the National Budget Process The Modern Presidency has been missing in action on the federal budget. Faced with a deficit crisis of historic proportions, all eyes are on President Barack Obama to pave the way to fiscal health. Yet he has repeatedly evaded the gazes. While vowing in early 2009 to cut the deficit in half in his first term, Obama signed bills over the next two years to cut taxes and increase spending. After commissioning a deficit panel in 2010, he has not thrown his weight behind any of its specific fiscal, entitlement, and budget process reform policy proposals. And halfway through fiscal year (FY) 2011, the government was running on two-week continuing resolutions. Why has this visionary presidential candidate repeatedly demurred from budgetary leadership? Most obviously, the president's modest institutional posture is a strategy to navigate the challenging policy and political landscape. First, the nascent economic recovery may require years of demand stimulation by the government. Second, long-standing public opinion incoherence on fiscal policy (how to reduce spending, pay for popular and expensive programs, and balance the budget simultaneously) has continued to paralyze congressional as well as executive leadership as they translate campaign promises into new law. Third, the president is seemingly hesitant to take big political risks as he absorbs the results of the 2010 midterm election (backlash against his perceived expansionist agenda after 2008) and looks ahead to 2012 (likely backlash against Republicans' perceived reductionist agenda after 2010). Acknowledging these pressures on the president, this paper will largely focus on how these actions change the orientation of the presidency toward the more Whiggish side of the power spectrum. In avoiding a firm fiscal agenda, and opting instead to goad Congress into playing the leading role in budget policy formation, Obama is speaking and behaving in a way that echoes an older conception of presidential place. Sometimes called the "constitutional" theory of the presidency, a Whig president demonstrates self-conscious institutional sensitivity to the separation of powers system through deferential rhetoric and action. This premodern theory stands in contrast to the "stewardship" (Theodore Roosevelt) and "prerogative" (Franklin Roosevelt) models of presidential power (Genovese 1976; Stokes 1976). For example, in an oft-cited description of such institutional thinking (not necessarily echoing nineteenth-century Whig Party economic views), William H. Taft rebuked his predecessor, Theodore Roosevelt, for misunderstanding the office. The true view of the Executive function is, as I conceive it, that the President can exercise no power which cannot be fairly and reasonably traced to some specific grant of power or justly implied and included within such express grant as proper and necessary to its exercise. Such specific grant must be either in the Federal Constitution or in an act of Congress passed in pursuance thereof. There is no undefined residuum of power which he can exercise because it seems to him to be in the public interest. (Taft 1916, 139-40). Of course, Taft's vision was on the verge of extinction even in his own time. …

This paper tests two predictions implied by models of the common-pool game in federations where subnational governments are more likely to have higher deficits because they do not internalize the macroeconomic effects of fiscal profligacy. The first is that subnational governments that belong to the same political party as the central government have lower spending and deficits because they are more likely to be influenced to internalize the macroeconomic effects of additional local spending; and the second is that subnational governments that are more dependent on intergovernmental transfers have higher spending and deficits. We find that in 15 major states of India over the period 1972-1995, states in fact have substantially higher spending and deficits (higher by about 10 percent of the sample average) when their government belongs to the same party as that governing at the center; and that intergovernmental grants tend to have a counter-intuitive negative effect on spending and deficits. The additional deficit of affiliated states is financed almost entirely by additional loans from the central government (as opposed to the market) leading to our interpretation that similar political considerations influence the distribution of deficits across states as they do other intergovernmental grants. We argue that the evidence from India, contrasted with broader international evidence, indicates that the effect of fiscal institutions in a federation is sensitive to underlying political incentives. This underscores the overall importance of political institutions in determining the consolidated government deficit, relative to specific rules of intergovernmental transfers.

In November 2005, because of Republican defections, the U.S. House of Representatives refused to accept the conference agreement on the LaborHHS appropriations bill-the first time the House leadership had lost an appropriations vote in ten years (Swindell, 2005). The timing was likely no coincidence, as (Republican) Majority Leader Tom DeLay had just stepped down after being indicted by a (Democratic) Texas prosecutor. DeLay, even more than his predecessor Newt Gingrich, had been a transformative leader who greatly centralized power. He broke formal and informal rules, such as holding floor votes open for as long as it took to twist a sufficient number of arms (this was done to pass the Medicare prescription drug benefit), depreciated seniority rights so that only close associates of the leaders became committee chairs, and abolished several appropriations subcommittees. No wonder his nickname became "The Hammer." So did DeLay's absence trigger a watershed event for the country's budget policy process and politics?

The purpose of this contribution is to look into the fiscal and debt policies in the UK and also to discuss their future prospects. In doing so we begin with a discussion of the sustainability of deficits and debt, along with a precisely definition of sustainability. This is followed by a focused discussion of issues that relate to debt and growth, which in its turn requires a comprehensive analysis of the intertemporal budget constraint thesis. Two further relevant and important issues are subsequently addressed. These are, first, the relationship between the intertemporal budget constraint thesis and sustainability, and, secondly, its consistency with household behaviour. The sustainability of deficits and ‘functional finance’, structural budgets and the impossibility of balanced structural budget are then discussed. Finally, the future of UK fiscal policy is addressed before we summarise and conclude.