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Government fiscal officers, practitioners and policy makers constantly deal with uncertainties in revenue and expenditure projections. These uncertainties create difficulties in resource allocation decisions when significant deviations occur. Clearly, certain variables account for these uncertainties and knowing them prior to revenue and expenditure planning may minimize potentials for errors. This study seeks to determine the identities and reliability of these variables through the application of a measurement model to aggregate data under the formulation that certain variables create uncertainties and affect significantly both revenues and expenditures of state and local governments. The results reveal that inflation, population, unemployment rate, time, government bond rate, and real long-term debts per capita are the most reliable indicators of both revenues and expenditures.

Understanding the relationship between government revenue and government expenditure is important from a policy point of view, especially for a country like Fiji, which is suffering from persistent budget deficits. The aim of this paper is to investigate the relationship between government revenue and expenditure for Fiji.

The Johansen test for cointegration and Granger causality test are used to conduct the empirical analysis.

The key findings are that: government revenue and government expenditure in both the aggregate and disaggregate sense are cointegrated; in the short‐run government expenditure Granger causes government revenue in an aggregate sense, departmental expenditure Granger causes aggregate revenue, and there is bidirectional causality running between government expenditure and customs duties; and in the long‐run there is evidence of fiscal synchronization, implying that expenditure decisions are not made in isolation from revenue decisions.

This fiscal synchronization has not been able curb the current account deficit in Fiji. Moreover, the confirmation of the spend‐tax attitude of the government does not bode well for the level of investments and skilled human capital in Fiji as this may perpetuate tax increases in the future. Given that the Fiji Government is currently trying to rein in the escalating level of fiscal deficit, it is an opportune time for them to engage in extensive expenditure reforms.

The findings of this paper should allow policy makers to make informed decisions. Furthermore, the paper is different from others because apart from examining the revenue and expenditure in an aggregate sense, it also considers the different components of revenue and expenditure.

This paper analyzes the impact of economic downturns on the revenue and expense sides of city financing for the period 2003 to 2009 using a convenience sample of the audited end of year financial reports for thirty midsized US cities. The analysis focuses on whether and how quickly and how extensively revenue and spending directions from past years are altered by recessions. A seven year series of Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR) data serves to explore whether citiesʼ revenues and spending, especially the traditional property tax and core functions such as public safety and infrastructure withstood the brief 2001 and the persistent 2007 recessions? The findings point to consumption (spending) over stability (revenue minus expense) for the recession of 2007, particularly in 2008 and 2009.

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.

Legislative procedures that expose tax expenditure proposals to scrutiny outside the taxation committees can improve a state legislature’s ability to control its tax base. These procedures -- fiscal notes, special subcommittees, joint taxation and spending committees, and bill size C move decisions away from the exclusive control of committees whose interests may be more narrow than the interests of the legislature as a whole. Strong legislative procedures do not, and should not, eliminate the passage of new tax exemptions, but it is desirable to enact only exemptions that match major policy objectives. Several factors, including an important economic special interest, a tax rate increase, or a major shift in intergovernmental fiscal relations, can boost an exemption past even the strongest procedures. Procedures appear to be most effective in limiting exemptions with a relatively small fiscal effect.

Although municipal enterprise funds provide several advantages to cities in the provision of goods and services, little is known about how these municipally operated businesses affect other aspects of the fiscal management practices of the cities which use them. This is particularly true of non-utility enterprises. This study uses the concept of net revenue transfers to examine how five commonly used non-utility enterprises impact the tax, expenditure, and revenue generation practices of cities. The results provide a new perspective and counter some commonly held views about non-utility enterprises.

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 Hong Kong government emphasizes very much the importance of achieving the “financial stability” objective, and has been very successful in controlling expenditure growth and in accumulating fiscal reserves. This remarkable performance is attributed to adhering consistently to budgetary guidelines. Managing the financial budgets through budgetary guidelines is a unique feature of the Hong Kong fiscal system. Discusses the role of budgetary guidelines in the Hong Kong fiscal system, and reviews the evolution of these budgetary guidelines since the early 1970s. It turns out that the guideline on expenditure growth is the most important budgetary guideline. Fiscal performance is assessed against these budgetary guidelines. With the financial stability objective having long been achieved, strict adherence to these budgetary guidelines would unduly constrain social and economic developments in Hong Kong. Recommends comprehensive review of the role and function of these budgetary guidelines.

Examines the revenue and expenditure behaviour of the 19 state governments in Nigeria separately for the civilian and military regimes of 1980‐83 and 1984‐87, respectively, with a view to comparing the two. Annual figures are employed in the regression analysis through pooling of time series and cross‐section data and all the endogenous items of state government budgetary accounts, expressed in per capita terms, are analysed. Suggests that: (1) per capita federal allocations, population, population density, per capita income, and literacy items all influence the per capita endogenous budgetary items; (2) the impacts of these factors, except population density, on the budgetary items materially differ over the civilian and military regimes; and (3) autonomous components of these endogenous budgetary items also differ over the two regimes.