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Budget practices in Canada's K‐12 education sector: Incremental, performance, or productivity budgeting?
Author(s) -
Ortynsky Stephanie,
Marshall Jim,
Mou Haizhen
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
canadian public administration
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.361
H-Index - 26
eISSN - 1754-7121
pISSN - 0008-4840
DOI - 10.1111/capa.12402
Subject(s) - productivity , public sector , construct (python library) , accounting , business , economics , public economics , economic growth , computer science , economy , programming language
This article reports on a first‐ever survey of budgeting practices regarding the public K‐12 education sector in Canada. We interviewed budget officers in 12 of the 13 Canadian provinces and territories. It finds that most jurisdictions construct budgets using incremental approaches and are not allowing for a potential of $5.4 billion in annual productivity gains. We discuss three budgeting approaches for governments to consider: incremental budgeting, performance‐based budgeting, and productivity budgeting. We argue for productivity budgeting because it improves cost‐efficiency, allows productivity gains to be captured at the centre, and is more feasible than performance‐based budgeting.