What are budgeting's purposes?: Comments on OECD's principles of good budgetary governance

Joseph White

OECD Journal on Budgeting, 2015, vol. 14, issue 3, 1-18

Abstract: OECD’s Recommendation of the Council on Budgetary Governance makes a substantial contribution to discussion of good budgetary practice by synthesising much common understanding while updating it to recognise some lessons from the experience of the Great Recession. Yet its implicit understanding of the purposes of budget processes has weaknesses both as policy and political analysis. The policy understanding overemphasises the importance of budget totals relative to budget details. The political understanding is as top-down as the policy view. Although budgets might be seen as contracts between citizens and the state, in a representative system they are better seen as treaties among citizens negotiated through politics. The Recommendation barely recognizes the existence of and challenges from political conflict. JEL classification: H00, H60, H61 Keywords: Balance, fiscal policy, information, representation, top-down, United States

JEL-codes: H00 H60 H61 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1787/budget-14-5jrtl4wnr8zw (text/html)
Full text available to READ online. PDF download available to OECD iLibrary subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oec:govkaa:5jrtl4wnr8zw

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in OECD Journal on Budgeting from OECD Publishing Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().