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Government budget...............................................................1

Role of budget........................................................................1

The accounting function of budget......................................1

Current and capital budget....................................................4

Cash and unified budget.................................................................5

Program budgeting and zero basic budgeting..............................5

Value for money measurements....................................................7

Budgeting planning:cash, volume and cost terms........................8

Component of budget......................................................................9

Expenditure......................................................................................10

Objective
 At this assignment, we should be able to:

Describe about the role of budgeting

Understand how accounting functions is work in budget

Identity current and capital budget

Distinguish Cash and budgets

Understand value for money measurement

Government budget

government budget, forecast by a government of its expenditures and revenues for a specific period of
time. In national finance, the period covered by a budget is usually a year, known as a financial or fiscal
year, which may or may not correspond with the calendar year. The word budget is derived from the Old
French bougette (“little bag”). When the British chancellor of the Exchequer makes his annual financial
statement, he is said to “open” his budget, or receptacle of documents and accounts.

General considerations

Role of the budget

Traditional functions

Government budgetary institutions in the West grew up largely as a result of the struggle for power
between the legislative and executive branches of government. With the decline of the feudal system, it
became necessary for kings and princes to obtain resources for their ventures from taxation rather than
dues. With the disappearance of the old feudal bonds, taxpayers demanded to be consulted before they
were taxed.

No scutage or aid shall be imposed in our kingdom unless by common counsel of our kingdom, except
for ransoming our person, for making our eldest son a knight, and for once marrying our eldest
daughter, and for these only a reasonable aid shall be levied.

This related to taxes only, not expenditures. For centuries Parliament seemed content to restrict the
amounts that the sovereign levied while letting him spend the money as he pleased. Only after the
controversies of the 17th century culminated in the Glorious Revolution (1688–89) and the Bill of Rights
did Parliament extend its concern from taxation to the question of expenditure contr

The histories of many countries have turned on financial crises. In France, for instance, the struggle
between the monarchy and the nobility over control of tax revenues was one of the causes of
the Revolution of 1789 that led to the overthrow of both the monarchy and the nobility.

The U.S. budget system also evolved out of controversy. In the early days of the republic there was
a dispute between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson as to the amount of discretion that
the executive branch should exercise in the spending of public funds. Jefferson’s victory enabled
Congress to assert its authority by making appropriations so highly specific as to hinder executive action.
Had Hamilton won, the treasury would have attained extraordinary power in relation both to Congress
and to the president.

Modern functions

In the 20th century a high proportion of economic activity is controlled, directly or indirectly, by various
levels of government (federal, or central, state, local, etc.). Thus the budget has taken on a number of
other functions as well as the simple monitoring of the overall revenue and expenditure of government.
Expenditure programs are now planned in considerable detail, but the sheer scale of public spending
raises major control problems, and varying systems of control have been tried in different countries.
Taxation is used not only to raise revenue but also to redistribute income and to encourage or
discourage certain activities. Government borrowing, in order to finance recurring deficits or wars, is so
substantial that budgetary policy has important effects on capital markets and on interest and credit
generally. The budget has also come to be used to achieve specific goals of economic policy. It was long
recognized that government borrowing could have important effects on the rest of the economy. As the
scale of government activity increased, the levels of expenditure and taxation were seen to have
substantial direct effects on the total demand for goods and services in the economy. This raised the
possibility that by changing these levels the government could use its fiscal policy to achieve full
employment and reduce economic fluctuations. This stabilization function

has been used by many countries, with varying degrees of success, to expand the economy out of
recession and to control inflationary pressures. In the United Kingdom, for example, postwar policy
involved a sequence of “stop-go” moves by government for stabilization; unfortunately these often
occurred too late and had unintended destabilizing effects.

As well as affecting the overall economy, the budget may have significant (intended and unintended)
effects in specific areas. Taxes affect incentives to work or to consume, while taxes, benefits, and
expenditures all affect the distribution of income. In this manner, budgets, particularly those that cause
major changes, have considerable political as well as economic impact.

The accounting functions of the budget

Traditionally the budget is presented to allow scrutiny (by taxpayers, voters, and the legislature) of the
resources raised by government and the uses to which these will be put. The publication of a budget
thus performs the role of generating accountability for the actions of government at various levels.
Historically, the focus of budgets has been to ensure that expenditures and revenues are properly
authorized; more recently, the budget has been developed as a framework within which complex
decisions on the allocation of resources can be made more effectively.

Alternative approaches to the budge

In order to deal with the increasing complexity of government’s role, most countries have experimented
with a variety of forms for the budget and its presentation. Among the more important of these are the
administrative budget, the current and capital budget, program and zero-base budgeting, and the full-
employment budget. The variety of budgeting methods is extended to the types of efficiency measures
used to increase value for money and to the alternative methods of projecting expenditures in cash,
volume, and cost terms.

Administrative budget

The traditional administrative budget contains the executive’s recommendations concerning the raising
of what Magna Carta referred to as “scutage or aid” and the disposal of it for purposes of government.
This kind of budget is designed to control expenditure; accordingly, it emphasizes the salaries and tasks
of civil servants rather than the results that they are supposed to achieve. The control objective of the
administrative budget naturally gives rise to the doctrine that the budget should be
balanced. Deficits imply irresponsibility. Surpluses imply the imposition of unwarranted tax burdens on
the public.

The limitation of the administrative budget is that some important items receive less than adequate
attention or are excluded from it entirely. Military procurement is one example. Neither budget offices
nor appropriations committees are well equipped to scrutinize the actual procurement of ships or
aircraft. Consequently, in most countries large expenditures on military items are often treated
perfunctorily while the activities of civil servants receive inordinate amounts of attention. The basic
weakness of the administrative budget is that it is principally concerned with whether expenditure has
been properly authorized, rather than whether money has been well spent.

Moreover, the administrative budget often excludes trust funds used to finance contributory old-age
and unemployment insurance; taxes are paid directly into the funds and disbursements made out of
them. The theory is that the government acts as trustee for the public and that the public is protected
by having its social security taxes put in a separate fund. Many countries have adopted this idea of
“social insurance”; it formed the heart of Bismarck’s social policy for Germany in the 1870s and of the
British welfare state, founded in 1948. In most cases, however, the attempt to generate a distinct fund
has failed, and “contributions” have become just another tax with expenditures on, for example,
retirement pensions paid irrespective of the resources available to the fund.

Other items may be included in the budget on a net rather than a gross basis. For instance, the total
receipts and expenditures of the post office or other commercial activities of the public sector usually do
not appear; only the deficit or surplus does. This is justified by the theory that, first, business
management is not well performed by legislative committees and, second, that so long as a business
undertaking pays its way, its conduct is not a matter of public concern. The problem is that the
distinction between commercial and noncommercial activities is often arbitrarily made.

Current and capital budget

The administrative budget traditionally deals only with current expenditures; in many countries, some
items are regarded as inappropriate for inclusion because they finance capital expenditures or are loans
to other public bodies. Such items are then included “below the line,” and the traditional concept of
budget balance is not applied to them; instead, it is regarded as permissible to finance them
by borrowing.

Direct public works or investment in nationalized industries are regarded by most countries as suitable
for loan financing on the ground that they are productive assets that will yield a revenue sufficient to
cover their cost. They may do so either directly, as in the case of a toll highway, or indirectly by
increasing the general economic welfare, as in the case of a free highway. If, however, there is no
market in which the output of a public activity is sold, there can be no objective test of its value. Hence,
governments are often tempted to classify expenditure on such assets as capital items that yield a social
but no economic return (e.g., free playgrounds) or a lower economic return than any private sector
institution would accept (as in government support for declining industries). For this reason, distinctions
between current and capital expenditures in public accounts are often viewed with suspicion.
This suspicion may be increased where, as is often the case, the rules for what is regarded as current or
capital are rather indistinct. Moreover, governments have been reluctant to adopt the systematic
distinction between current and capital items, or between cash flows and profit and loss accounts, or to
construct a balance sheet, even though these mechanisms of monitoring receipts and expenditures are
universal in private sector accounting. The federal government of the United States, for example, has
resisted the idea of a capital budget, even though there was strong pressure for one in the 1930s when
economists and politicians wanted to legitimize the government deficit. Among U.S. state and municipal
governments, however, loan financing of public works is the regular practice for two reasons. First,
those bodies are usually unable to finance their projects by current taxation; second, they do not want
to finance them because the projects are generally of a long-term nature.

Most national governments have become accustomed to thinking in terms of national economic policies
in which the amount of borrowing to be undertaken depends on current requirements for stability and
growth. This makes capital budgeting less attractive, particularly if the government wishes to use the
budget to supplement the national flow of savings. The more need there is to increase saving, the
smaller should be the amount of government borrowing. On the other hand, government borrowing is
justified when private savings tend to exceed private capital requirements.

This lack of explicit monitoring for the capital position of governments can have serious consequences
when the government unwittingly takes on large liabilities or uses capital assets to finance current
expenditures. Examples are provided by the growing problems in some countries in financing generous
state pension schemes and the wasting of assets such as oil reserves.

Cash and unified budgets

Faced with the increasing complexity of government activities, many countries have fallen back on the
idea of the cash budget. This has the merits of simplicity and comprehensiveness. As used in the United
States, it presents total payments by the federal government to and from the public (including other
levels of government). It is thus similar to the cash flow account of a modern business. Trust fund
expenditures and receipts are included, as well as cash payments and receipts involved in loan
transactions. Government business undertakings such as the post office, however, are still included on a
net basis.

In the United Kingdom all public expenditure planning is now performed on a cash basis, and many
programs are “cash limited,” whatever the level of inflation. This procedure, to which the United
Kingdom moved in 1976, is justified on the grounds that such treatment helps to control inflationary
pressures and exerts stricter control than, for example, planning in volume terms.

The cash budget suffers from the defect that it is not directly tied to government decision making.
Liabilities incurred do not synchronize completely with payments. This is because government
expenditures result from appropriations and other forms of commitments; cash expenditures may
follow appropriations and other commitments of money only after a considerable lag, notably in the
case of construction and procurement. Appropriations relate to actions in the future. Expenditures
result from past decisions. Both kinds of information are needed for a complete appraisal.
The U.S. government, in an effort to reduce public confusion over the large variety of budgetary
concepts, has adopted a so-called unified budget concept that is more logical than the cash budget but
differs from it only in some details that do not materially affect the budget aggregates. The unified
budget differs from the traditional administrative budget in two main ways: it includes the receipts and
outlays of most funds, and it eliminates interagency transfers.

Program budgeting and zero-base budgeting

Traditionally, government expenditures have been considered as inputs rather than outputs. This is
because, in the classical 19th-century conception, the well-run government does not produce a
marketable output. The program budget derives from this concept; it attempts, however, to classify
expenditures in terms of the outputs to which they are devoted. For example, a traditional school
budget would categorize expenditures in terms of teachers, books, and buildings; what came out of the
process would be left to the reader’s intuition or experience. The program budget, in contrast, attempts
to assign expenditures to specific outputs, categorizing them according to numbers of children
completing various programs.

In government, budgets have traditionally been constructed according to departments and agencies of
government. This may be justified on historical or administrative grounds, but it does not necessarily
correspond to the structure of activity. Every country organizes the civilian and military components of
its foreign policy in separate departments, but this is frequently a serious obstacle to effective policy
making. Again, the requirements of good administration suggest that there should be a single
department of agriculture. But that department’s activities impinge on those of others, in both domestic
and foreign policy. A budget constructed according to actual programs would cut across departmental
boundaries.

Program budgeting is an attempt to apply the economics of choice to public decision making. Its basic
assumption is that explicit choice among alternative courses of action leads to better results than do
other methods of decision making. At the highest governmental levels difficult choices must be made
that involve the use of a portion of the nation’s resources. But the same principles apply to decision
making at lower levels. The problem of allocating resources within a specific field, such as health or
education, is conceptually similar to that faced in drawing up the national budget.

Program budgeting also takes account of the time dimension in many government programs. New
undertakings often take time to come into operation. A typical new program may have to pass through
a research and development phase and an investment or construction phase before it reaches the
operating phase. Alternative programs may differ considerably in this respect. The process of choosing
among alternatives frequently involves trading the present against the future. One alternative may
require 10 years before it yields results; another may yield smaller results but more quickly. The kinds of
choices made in government often involve alternatives that cannot be measured in terms of market
value. For this reason governmental decisions involve much more uncertainty than do most business
decisions.
A governmental program must therefore be frequently revised in the light of unfolding circumstances.
Indeed, every year should be thought of as the first year of a new program. Pervasive uncertainty also
requires a high degree of flexibility and a capacity for program revision. A number of options should be
held open, particularly in the development phase. Even though this may appear costly, it is less costly
than commitment to a design that proves to be inappropriate because of circumstances that could not
be foreseen in the early stages.

In most countries the usual procedure for deciding on government expenditure in a forthcoming year
has been to assume that existing expenditure was appropriate and then to decide on incremental
expenditure for each program. Such an approach means, however, that the change is likely to increase,
rather than decrease, expenditure and that little attention is paid to what the full existing program
actually accomplishes.

designers envisaged. A similar attempt was made in the United Kingdom in the introduction of program
analysis reviews (PAR), but again attempts to evaluate systematically the whole of government
expenditure were unsuccessful. The degree of inertia in the system and the vested interests of existing
institutions have proved too entrenched to be overcome by administrative procedure.

Full-employment budget

Although the idea of budget balance in the administrative budget has been the dominant consideration
in the budgetary policy of most countries, it has gradually been realized that such a concept may be
inappropriate when external shocks such as exchange rate movements or a world recession occur.
Because varying levels of unemployment are a major reason why expenditures may change without
comparable change in the public sector output, the concept of a full-employment budget has emerged.
This type of budgeting is based on receipts and expenditures that would prevail under conditions of full
employment. The approach views the actual expenditures and receipts for the coming year as of
secondary importance; it assigns primary importance to the influence of the budget on the national
economy. In time of recession a budget deficit may thus be presented as a necessary step toward
achieving a balanced budget at full employment. Ideally, the budget should include estimates of
expenditures and revenues at full employment, and also estimates of the same items at the anticipated
level of employment. These ideas have been extensively used in the United
StatesAn analogous procedure could be used with respect to inflation, but this idea is still far from
acceptance, because governments are no less reluctant to anticipate inflation than they are to budget
for unemployment.

Value for money measurements

As the emphasis in budgetary policy has shifted away from mere authorization of government spending
and toward more public scrutiny of what government accomplishes, the idea of appraising value
received for money spent in government finance has grown in importance. This has led to an increasing
variety of measurements of public sector efficiency. In general terms, taxpayers need to be satisfied that
their money is being used wisely. Because of the wide variety of items within even a single program,
however, it is often difficult to identify precisely what is spent on the provision of each service, and the
services that are provided rarely have well-developed private sector counterparts to act as a basis for
comparison.

In some programs, governments have developed efficiency measures that relate observable facts, such
as the quality of national health or the number of operations performed, to the cost of providing the
service. The use of such measures is by no means widespread, however, and their basis is often open to
question. The principal difficulty is that there is either no meaningful measure of the output of a public
service—defense, for example—or output is complicated and multidimensional—as with education or
health. The result is that any method used to measure efficiency is open to debate and challenge.

Attempts to control public expenditure, particularly since the mid-1970s, have led to some
reexamination of which programs should remain in the public sector. In the United Kingdom many
services (for example, hospital cleaning) have been transferred from public sector agencies to private
contractors, in the search for more cost-efficient purchasing.

Budgetary planning: cash, volume, and cost terms

There are three principal bases for public expenditure planning: cash, volume, and cost. The cash basis is
concerned simply with the projected money expenditure on the services involved. Making such
projections is difficult because what the cash expenditure will buy depends on what happens to prices
over the planning period. Moreover, many public expenditures cannot be planned in cash terms,
because legislation prescribes the output. Most social benefits, for example, must be paid to anyone
who is entitled to receive them, and this means that the government cannot control directly the amount
of the expenditure.

The volume basis is concerned with the planned output of public services. The difficulties of measuring
output, however, have already been noted. More often the planning process, assuming that changes in
inputs are associated with changes in outputs, operates with reference to the cost basis of programs.

All countries have an annual program of public expenditure allocation, in which those responsible for
individual programs argue for greater allocations for their activities and those responsible for raising the
money attempt to control the amount allocated. In practice, the results of this process depend as much
on the political weight of individuals in charge of a spending program as on an objective assessment of
its desirability. The normal practice is to take as a base what each program spent the previous year and
then argue about incremental changes, rather than (as under zero-base budgeting) to consider each
program in its totality. This creates perverse incentives, in that departmental heads who have saved
money in one area in a particular year have an incentive to spend more in other areas in order to
protect next year’s total budget.

The basis for most expenditure planning is therefore the number of public employees already in place
and the volume of goods and services purchased in the base year. This, multiplied by base year prices,
gives the input volume in the base year. In the late 20th century many countries (particularly the United
Kingdom) have been abandoning this approach, largely because it gives inadequate control of total
expenditure. One reason for a given volume’s costing too much to supply is the so-called relative price
effect. This arises because goods and services bought by the public sector (labour, medical care, or
defense equipment) may rise in price more quickly than commodities generally. Once this has been
determined, volume can be expressed in cost terms. The relative price effect is somewhat subjective,
however, because of the difficulty of measuring the quality of goods and services. In the case particularly
of health care and defense, the relative price effect will often contain the increased price of services and
improved equipment, which are actually a volume increase.

Although planning in cash has a superficial simplicity, at times of significant inflation it is not a very
appropriate tool, and differential price rises may lead to a balance of expenditure provision somewhat
different from the intended plan. In practice, although cash planning is presented as the base on which
decisions are taken, those countries that have adopted this approach in fact allow informal flexibility in
cash budgets, with volume measures being implicitly, if not explicitly, adopted.

Components of the budget

In the United States the budget for each fiscal year contains detailed information on the outlays
intended by the federal government and the receipts expected, including those from trust funds. The
budget also divides authorized expenditure into that which can be carried out without action
by Congress and that which requires further authorization. In any year, about half of federal expenditure
requires authorization from Congress; by withholding this authorization, Congress is able to force
changes in the government’s budgetary policy. The budget also summarizes the outstanding debt of the
federal government and estimates the size of the surplus or deficit expected on the basis of the revenue
and expenditure projected in the budget.

The U.S. budget is presented as a coherent whole for lengthy consideration by Congress, during which
time it is often substantially revised. This joint consideration of revenue and expenditure is also common
in most European countries. Practice in the United Kingdom, and in other countries with a British
parliamentary tradition, continues to reflect the historical separation of revenue and expenditure.
The U.K. budget consists of a number of different documents, with only limited attempts being made to
relate one to another. A sketchy report of the government’s intentions is given in an Autumn Statement,
usually published in November, and detailed expenditure plans are provided in February or March in
a White Paper. The U.K. budget, usually presented in March, is mainly concerned with taxation and is
represented in a separate volume entitled Financial Statement and Budget Report. This gives a general
outline of budgetary strategy, details of proposed tax changes, and estimates of likely revenues, as well
as details of such items as capital receipts from asset sales and the size of the contingency reserve of
unallocated money to cover unforeseen events.

Partly because of this fragmentation of the U.K. budget, and the difficulty of relating the public
expenditure White Paper to the Financial Statement and Budget Report, debate is limited, and it is rare
for any detail to be changed after the documents are published. The fragmentation of the budget
is exacerbated further by the presentation of details of social security expenditure in yet another
document.

Expenditure
 Composition of public expenditure

Expenditures authorized under a national budget are divided into two main categories. The first is the
government purchase of goods and services in order to provide services such as education, health care,
or defense. The second is the payment of social security and other transfers to individuals and the
payment of subsidies to industrial and commercial companies. Both types are usually labeled “public
expenditure,” and in many countries attention usually focuses on the aggregate of the two. This
obscures important differences in the economic significance of the two items, however. The first
represents the public sector’s claim on total national resources; the second the scale of
its redistribution within the private sector.

In most Western countries, the share of the public sector in total economic activity averages between 20
and 30 percent. This reflects the proportion of workers who are employed in the public sector or in
publicly financed activities, the proportion of national output generated there, and the proportion of
incomes derived for productive services that is earned by public sector employees.

Some of these activities yield commercial revenues—the postal service, for example. Most have to be
financed by taxation. In addition, the government raises taxation in order to redistribute income within
the private sector of the economy. It taxes some activities and subsidizes others—through investment
credits, for example. On a larger scale, it uses the benefit and social security system to make payments
to needy individuals and raises taxes in order to subsidize those who warrant it. With this redistributive
activity, plus the direct government productive activity financed from legislation, the total share of
incomes taken in taxation is higher than the share of government in total production. It averages around
40 percent in Western economies.

In addition to direct expenditures, attention has been drawn to “tax expenditures.” If the government
favours a particular activity—such as investment—grants or tax concessions may be awarded to that
activity. The two procedures have much the same effect on investment and on government revenues,
but one appears to raise public expenditure and the other to reduce taxation. It has been suggested that
these tax expenditures—tax reductions motivated by an economic or social objective—should be the
subject of a tax expenditure budget similar to the public expenditure budget, and several countries have
now moved in that direction.

For all private and public purposes within the economy, the scale of public activity is best measured as a
proportion of national income: the total of incomes generated or (equivalently) of expenditures on
goods and services.

The overall proportion of national income that is collected in taxes, raised from profits on government
activities, or borrowed varies widely in the developed nations. This variation reflects different national
decisions concerning the proportion of a nation’s activity deemed most appropriate to have carried out
by the various levels of government or by government agencies. Much of the variation occurs because of
choices over the provision of health care (mostly public
Expenditures on transfers also vary widely, depending partly on how redistributive the government
wishes to be, partly on how much of this redistribution is carried out through the tax system, and partly
on factors such as the number of old people and the level of unemployment. The dominant payment in
every country is for old-age pensions, and the amount depends on how well-developed private sector
pensions are. Another factor is the extent to which the government chooses to use direct subsidies
rather than tax concessions to stimulate the economy.

Europe public expenditure was both larger (as a share of national income) and more centralized during
this same time. The United Kingdom, for example, devoted about 12 percent of national income to
centrally funded social security programs; 5 percent each to defense, the health

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