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This study aims to investigate the relationships among budget emphasis, budget planning models, and performance, to determine whether an emphasis on the budget has indirect effects on performance, in the presence of other budget planning characteristics as mediators.

A questionnaire survey was conducted and structural equation modeling was used to test the proposed models among the constructs and related hypotheses.

The results indicate that while budget planning models entirely mediate the influence of budget emphasis on the performance of management and the organization, they partially mediate the influence of budget emphasis on budget satisfaction. In addition, it is determined that differentiation strategies have a significantly positive influence on budget emphasis, budget planning models and performance.

The results of this study provide a reference for organizations in the design of budgeting systems. During the design process, budget planning models should consider the degree of emphasis an organization places on the budget.

Virtually all businesses must perform financial planning and budgeting. The paper presents a normative design framework for developing a management information system to support these activities. The design sustains planning processes across organizational levels. The system may be evoked with either a modeling or budgeting orientation which supports bottom‐up, top‐down, or in‐side‐out planning. An analysis function forges alink between top‐down and bottom‐up planning. This linkage provides flexibility in developing alternative business plans. The normative design provides a standard for creating and evaluating alternative system designs, to determine the most appropriate system for a particular business situation.

This article analysed how data collection systems (DCS) developed by governmental audit organizations (Court of Accounts) affect budgetary planning within local governments.

Eighteen semi-structured interviews complemented by six time-lagged interviews via WhatsApp were carried out with the actors involved in the preparation and auditing of the Medium-Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF) in Brazilian local governments. Documents such as the structured layouts of Courts' DCS and the publicised MTEF prepared by local governments were also analysed.

The findings indicate that Courts' DCS structured layouts reduce local governments' budgetary planning autonomy in elaborating their MTEF. It happens as the Courts' main driver is to make MTEF information auditable and not to improve the usefulness of information by governments. As a result, the planning choices of the local governments end up limited, not by the general legislation but by the rules established by the computerized systems of the Courts.

The paper's originality relies on demonstrating that the digitalisation of audit processes ultimately affects local governments' practices through structured layouts for the data collection on MTEF information - that impose rigidity on the budget planning process of local governments. The authors highlight the role of public sector auditing organisations as potential catalysts of reforms; however, this should be considered cautiously since the drivers and motivations of the organisation that sponsors public financial management reforms matter for overall reform effectiveness.

Presents a selective review of the application of Operations Research (OR) in higher education administration. Identifies eight important types of operational management problems in higher education and discusses the use of OR methods to deal with these problems. Seeks to make administrators in higher education aware of the great potential of application of OR to assist them in making decisions, and to show the OR community that higher education is an area where plentiful opportunities exist for OR applications.

This chapter describes an institutional choice that most Latin American countries have taken in the past 25 years: the creation of national Public Performance Monitoring and Evaluation (PPME) systems. We summarize research assessing their institutionalization, identify their shortcomings, and discuss trends demonstrating a potential – not yet realized – to fulfill their vocation as instruments of political and democratic accountability. Despite remarkable progress in their institutionalization, the evidence suggests that the systems fall short in producing strong results-oriented democratic accountability. Key factors hindering this aspiration include the systems' low credibility, problems associated to their diversification, low institutional coherence, and lack of effective coordination mechanisms to improve information legibility, its quality, its usefulness, and thus its use by both public managers and citizens. We suggest that PPME systems depend on environmental conditions beyond government structures and processes and argue that citizen-oriented mechanisms and entry points for social participation around the systems are required to fulfill their accountability function.

Decentralization of mental health services delivery through the implementation of community‐based mental health centres has greatly increased the complexity in the administration of US mental health programmes. Decision makers have to allocate limited resources between traditional hospital programmes and the community centres. Presents a goalprogramming‐planning model which allows the decision maker to analyse trade‐offs between healthcare objectives as well as to assess the budgetary and staff ramifications of various policy decisions. Illustrates the model through the use of a case example from a Midwestern US mental health services programme.

This study aims to investigate the influence of budgetary participation on budget quality on top of the moderating role of environmental uncertainty on the said relationship.

The objectives of the current study were achieved through a survey conducted in 15 Iraqi states. Each state contains several municipalities. In total, 180 survey forms were disseminated to the heads of the municipalities, where ultimately 155 questionnaires proceeded to the data analysis stage. In this stage, statistical package for social sciences, analysis of moment structure and structural equation modelling were used to solve the research problem and achieve the objectives.

Through the results of the statistical analysis, this study concluded the significant and positive effect of budgetary participation on budget quality. In addition, the study confirmed the moderating role of environmental uncertainty in weakening the positive relationship between budgetary participation and budget quality.

The findings can be used to encourage municipal institutions and local governments to expand on the factor of employee participation in affecting the process of budget determination, hence mitigating budget failure.

Regional health care planning deals with the regional healthcare resource location‐allocation problem posed to each public healthcare administration. Up to date, the models designed to support this kind of decision failed in their application. We found that the main reason is that often these models restrict the problem to a unique aspect (such as “covering of the territory” or “technique efficiency”), leaving outside a set of very important other dimensions, even if these are usually subjective and difficult to formalise. In this paper we present a method to identify formally these dimensions, by assigning measurable attributes to each of them. At a different level, we propose a hierarchical formulation of the overall objective of the regional healthcare resource planning for the facility systems; in this hierarchy, each leaf term corresponds to a formal evaluation criterion.

Being able to predict the likelihood of a project to overrun its cost before the contract signing phase is crucial in developing the required mitigating measures to avert it. Known parameters that permit the timely prediction of cost overrun provide the basis for such predictions. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to develop a model for forecasting cost overruns.

Ten predictive variables known before the contract signing phase of a project are identified. Based on a survey approach, information on 321 educational projects completed are compiled. A multiple linear regression analysis is adopted for the model development.

Five variables – initial contract sum, gross floor area, number of storeys, source of funds and contractors’ financial classification are observed to influence cost overruns. The model, however, yields a fairly weak coefficient of determination with a mean absolute percentage error of 30.22 and 138 per cent, respectively.

The model developed focussed on data only educational projects sampled from three out of the ten administration regions in Ghana based on a purposive sampling approach.

Policy makers and construction managers working on public projects stand to gain tremendous assistance in formulating and strengthening their own in-house cost forecasting at the precontract phase based on “what if” analysis to generate various alternative predictions of cost overruns.

Considering the innate nature of cost overruns within the Ghanaian construction industry often resulting to project abandonment, this research presents a unique dimension for tackling cost overruns based on a predictive approach.

The purpose of the paper is to outline a practical perspective for testing performance in the process of institutional reform in developing countries.

The test is presented from a donor's perspective. The paper does so by introducing a framework for testing the sustainability, impact and replication of reforms, to achieve local development. These areas of performance are set against the institutional development agenda of structures, processes and contextual reforms. The test goes on to highlight the sustainable outcomes and institutional consolidation of such reforms. This is considered at community, local and central government levels.

Testing performance is an important part of United Nations Capital Development Fund (UNCDF) practice. Its current concerns for sustainability and policy impact are being enhanced by a more explicit connection between institutional reform, through decentralisation, and poverty impact.

The concepts outlined are designed to be of application to a donor concerned with seeking to achieve decentralisation through local development initiatives. The paper's value is as a reflection of current UNCDF policy experiments in the least developed countries (LDCs). These experiments are designed to enrich its practice and influence its partners in the field.

There are few normative frameworks for testing performance on institutional reform. This test is particularly acute in the LDCs, the primary focus for UNCDF work. This technical paper is an attempt to develop a framework to allow donors to test their own work concerning institutional reform, particularly at the local government level.