Budget Rules and Flexibility in the Public Sector: Towards a Taxonomy

Michael Di Francesco*, John Alford

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

12 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

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.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)232-256
Number of pages25
JournalFinancial Accountability and Management
Volume32
Issue number2
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 May 2016
Externally publishedYes

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