In my recent technical note Top-Down Budgeting Today, I set out a clear alternative to the failed hard ministry ceilings doctrine. The HCM doctrine, which has become PFM conventional wisdom, asserts that governments should set expenditure ceilings for ministries during the initial (strategic) phase of the budget preparation process. Ministries should then prepare their budget […]
Performance information is crucial for high-performance government. Performance budgeting is part of that: budget decision-making needs to be informed by good information about the effectiveness and efficiency of government spending. The approach to performance information must, however, be highly strategic. To succeed, it needs to be built on a recognition of two fundamental realities. Firstly, […]
Evaluation should be a key source of information for budget decision-makers. In practice, however, it has had surprisingly little impact on decisions about what to fund and by how much. This raises the question: what can be done to realize the true potential of evaluation to improve budgeting? The failure of evaluation to contribute much […]
There is wide agreement that attacking budgetary incrementalism is an important objective of budget reform. But when we go into battle against incrementalism, we need to be clear on what exactly we are fighting against. Like many other people, I use “incrementalism” to refer to the tendency of budgeting to treat baseline expenditure as given, […]
Spending review, as I wrote recently, will be needed more than ever in the post-pandemic era. Surely, then, it is encouraging that there has over the past decade been a major expansion in the number of countries practicing spending review? Well, yes, but there is a problem. The problem is that in some countries, the […]