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 language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 232-256 |
Number of pages | 25 |
Journal | Financial Accountability and Management |
Volume | 32 |
Issue number | 2 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 1 May 2016 |
Externally published | Yes |