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Carry-overs or leftovers? Tackling year-end spend-downs at the central government level.
- Source :
- Public Money & Management; Sep2019, Vol. 39 Issue 6, p393-400, 8p
- Publication Year :
- 2019
-
Abstract
- Year-end spend-downs have received a lot of attention in public policy and public administration, and a number of budgeting and accounting reforms have been made to tackle this issue. While carry-overs have been thought to be a remedy, their effect remains empirically under-investigated. This paper applies a mixed-method approach to provide empirical evidence for year-end spending surges, and to analyse the effect of changing carry-over rules in Austria. The authors uncover the reasons behind spend-downs: uncertainty about carry-overs and their use, and the risk of losing unspent appropriations and efficiency savings seem to explain year-end spend-downs. The findings offer support for prior calls in the academic literature to take time and volume limitations into account when designing and implementing carry-over rules. The evidence presented here has important implications for policy-makers and managers. Using the case of Austria, this paper investigates year-end spend-downs in government, and one of the most common 'remedies'—carry-overs. Unrestricted carry-overs are likely to jeopardize aggregate fiscal targets, and highly restrictive rules about carry-over can lead to a loss of trust between central government entities and the ministry of finance. Surprisingly, carry-over rules themselves have led to year-end spend-downs. The authors explain the criteria/limitations that policy-makers, treasury officials, and financial directors and managers in central government departments and agencies need to consider when designing and implementing carry-over rules. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Subjects :
- FEDERAL government
GOVERNMENT policy
BUDGET reform
PUBLIC administration
LEFTOVERS
Subjects
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 09540962
- Volume :
- 39
- Issue :
- 6
- Database :
- Complementary Index
- Journal :
- Public Money & Management
- Publication Type :
- Academic Journal
- Accession number :
- 137944423
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.1080/09540962.2019.1583909