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In August 2015, the Government Accounting Standards Board (GASB) adopted Statement 77, requiring government disclosure in audited financial reports of a particular type of tax expenditure, tax abatements. GASB's reporting standards move tax abatements from a budgetary environment to an accounting environment. This paper evaluates GASB 77's provisions to encourage an early and on-going dialogue about the Statement's prospects for achieving greater transparency compared to existing tax expenditure reporting efforts. We conclude that GASB 77 will be most beneficial to consumers of financial information in medium and large jurisdictions where there is no alternative tax abatement disclosure platform, or where the alternative offers less transparency than what can be achieved through financial reporting.

The aim of this paper is to explore whether and how external, political, financial and governance factors influence capital expenditure deviations in the Swedish municipal water and sewerage sector and to capture the consequences of municipal organisational fragmentation.

Panel data analysis of 238 municipalities and 1,190 observations of capital expenditure deviations over five years (2013–2017).

Apart from a low overall on average execution rate of 69%, the Swedish municipal water and sewerage sector seems generally sensitive to external stakeholder pressure for budget compliance, but not to the political power situation. Further, political signalling incentives generally do not influence capital expenditure deviations in the contexts of municipal corporations and cooperations, which supports the idea that these governance forms insulate the organisation from general stakeholder pressure and political control.

The practical implication is that large and constant capital expenditure deviations call for change in regulation and governance of the municipal sector. However, in countries such as Sweden, where externalising services to municipal corporations and cooperations is significant, this discussion needs to address the consolidated level of the municipality. Otherwise, a large share of the investment budget will be unscrutinised. More closely related to the Swedish water and sewerage sector, the risks associated with a constantly low execution rate should be analysed and addressed.

First, this paper contributes to the knowledge of aggregated capital expenditure deviations in general and specifically within the municipal water and sewerage sector. Second, analysing the municipal governance landscape adds further insights and suggestions on why budget performance varies. The results especially highlight that the governance forms of corporations and cooperations change the relation to political signalling incentives.

1.1 What Are Accounts For? Overview The purpose of accounts is to reveal performance in the conduct of a business or other activity concerned with use of economic resources (e.g. a club). It is thus a matter of stewardship. Although, like economics, it is necessary in accounting to use money as a measure of performance, it is concerned with the individual organisation rather than with economic phenomena as a whole.

The chapter is devoted to the factors aimed at optimizing the partnership of public and private sectors in the sphere of public infrastructure development. In modern conditions of economic slowdown and budget consolidation in Russia, the infrastructure has become the most important driver of economic growth and public–private partnership (PPP) – the most perspective form of cooperation of public and private investors of infrastructure projects. PPP interpretation as a structural relationship of economic system allows the authors to model optimal combination of formal and informal institutions in order to stimulate long-term economic growth. It becomes promising to model replacement of budget funds by private investment to ensure positive impact on the Russian development despite the budget consolidation. It could only be achieved in the case of formal institutionalization of appropriate conditions for private investors as to low transactional costs and attractive financial parameters. There have been determined some PPP standards connected with public infrastructure projects in order to reduce capital expenditures of the budget funds and increase the inflow of private investment. The authors have managed to obtain model estimates and graphic interpretation of government expenditures’ efficiency increase that could help to structure the fiscal conditions to induce positive multiplier effect as a result of PPP forms improvement in the public infrastructure development.

Expenditure management practices in Asia shows that these vary from the ]still-in-transition’ China, to the colonial concerns of compliance in the South Asian countries, to more advanced experiments in Singapore. Budgetary practices in many of these countries are characterized by incremental and bottom-up budgets, across-the-board cuts in times of fiscal stress, and little or no analysis of costs and outputs. At the same time, resource allocation as a percentage of GDP and accrual accounting are being tried in some other countries. The paper suggests that the institutional changes now underway in these countries and the imperative need to control expenditure could bring meaningful changes.

This article aims to examine empirically the relationship between budget periodicity and expenditure volatility in state governments. Using a large panel dataset for fifty states over the years 1960-2012, after controlling for institutional, economic, and political factors, we find general expenditure of biennial states has been significantly less volatile than that of annual states. The finding suggests that a choice between annual and biennial budget period can emerge as a feasible and effective countercyclical strategy to overcome fiscal difficulties in the short run and promote fiscal stability in the long run.

This paper tests public budgeting as a long-run and short-run process; political decision makers strive to head toward budgetary balance over the long run but are constrained in the short run and follow incremental decision-making. First, the budget equilibrium theory is stated and is used to explain the relationship between revenues and expenditures. Second, the interaction between expenditures and revenues is tested with a vector error correction model for Canada, UK and the US, using annual time series data between 1948 and 2000. The results show that, in the long-run, revenues are the driving force behind the budget in Canada; in the UK expenditures force the budget toward balance. In the short-run, incrementalism occurs in both of these countries. The most interesting finding is for the United States where on-budget revenues and expenditures both push the budget toward balance over the longrun but there is no incrementalism in the process in the short-run. This, of course, is contrary to much of the existing literature.

This article surveys budgetary reforms in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries, which have aimed both at reducing budget deficits and improving public sector performance.(1) It discusses the pressures giving rise to these reforms, recent trends in reducing deficits and the changes to budgetary processes adopted by various countries. Brief reference is also made to changes in expenditure programs. In some OECD Member countries, changes to budgetary processes have been part of an overall program of reform in public sector management. While there are differences of emphasis between countries, there is considerable convergence toward establishing new budgetary processes which have multi-year approach, provide for greater budgetary devolution to ministries and agencies and focus more on managing the performance of government organizations and programs.

We construct yearly fiscal series for Sweden between 1719 and 2003 including expenditures, revenues, deficits and debt. We present measures for the fiscal branch of the central government as well as for the consolidated fiscal and monetary branch, which includes fiscal seigniorage. We evaluate the reliability and consistency of the series by calculating the difference between budget deficits and the change in debt to test if the differences are serially uncorrelated around zero, which we confirm.

The purpose of this paper is to attempt an empirical examination of government budgeting and expenditure processes in Nigeria, a developing country. It examines the current state of budgeting and public funds management (PFM) in Nigeria. It also examines the extent to which the government has used the budgetary mechanism to effectively manage the nation’s economy.

The paper employed simple regression estimation technique for data analysis. Time series data set of budgetary information was constructed from different archival sources over a 16-years period (2000-2015), majorly the national Appropriation Acts, press releases, regulatory and governmental reports, reports of Transparency International, World Bank and Central Intelligence Agency.

The findings confirm that the nation’s annual budgeting approach is defective and lags in achieving its fiscal objectives. The budget indicates a state of poor accountability and transparency in PFM. Findings also suggest that the level of economic development in Nigeria is not commensurate with the size of government expenditure.

The paper draws the attention of the government to the need to restructure its approach to budgeting and adopt a more resilient approach that suits its environment and economic peculiarities in effort to ensure efficient management and accountability of public funds. The paper also offers value to other developing countries. It provides empirical evidence that explains an aspect why the African continent remains underdeveloped hitherto.

This paper lends a voice to the call for a restructuring of the Nigerian budgetary system and its implementation strategy. It advocates for the adoption of an alternative budgeting approach that matches Nigeria economic realities. The paper demonstrated that the traditional budgetary approach being used by many developing countries is limited in certain ways and could hinder sustainable development.