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Budget Rules and Flexibility in the Public Sector: Towards a Taxonomy
Author(s) -
Di Francesco Michael,
Alford John
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
financial accountability and management
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.661
H-Index - 44
eISSN - 1468-0408
pISSN - 0267-4424
DOI - 10.1111/faam.12087
Subject(s) - discretion , taxonomy (biology) , flexibility (engineering) , devolution (biology) , scope (computer science) , management control system , public sector , public economics , control (management) , business , government (linguistics) , accounting , economics , public administration , computer science , political science , management , sociology , law , programming language , linguistics , botany , philosophy , economy , anthropology , biology , human evolution
The practices and norms of public budgeting have often been seen as a brake on the flexibility needed of government organisations. This remains true despite historically significant financial management reforms designed around budgetary devolution. Seeing flexibility as operating along two dimensions – devolution and discretion – this paper revisits the underlying features of traditional public budgeting to develop a taxonomy of six generic ‘budget rules’. By isolating key properties of budget control, the paper uses two of the more prominent rules – annuality and purpose – to illustrate how the rules interact to generate control capacity, as well as the scope for rule variability in promoting increased flexibility.