budgetary autonomy

budgetary autonomy, degree of independence enjoyed by a public entity in the management of its finances.

Most commonly, the budget refers to the central government as a consolidated institution in which the executive, legislative, and judicial branches follow accepted procedures to manage income and outflows for a given time period. For a variety of reasons, government entities may be granted a degree of independence in the management of their finances. This means that the processes that govern their revenues and outlays are not the same as those that apply to the general government budget. Government entities are allowed to make their own decisions about how to raise financing, such as through taxes or loans, and to make decisions about the way in which they would like to allocate their expenditures, such as spending on personnel, investment, or maintenance.

There are different degrees of autonomy that are important to consider. In some cases, entities with budgetary autonomy are entirely outside the purview of the rest of government, and other branches of government have no formal authority to examine, approve, or evaluate their finances. In other cases, a periodic report must be submitted, usually to the legislature, which can decide if the finances of the autonomous agency should be approved or sent along to the judiciary for further examination.

Some of the reasons for budgetary autonomy can be traced to the ideas of public choice analyses of politics. According to public choice perspectives, government agents act as individuals responding to incentives, much as actors within a market. Budgetary autonomy provides a different set of incentives than traditional budget processes do and, in this way, opens the possibility of a new set of principal-agent relationships. This can break with prior practice and introduce a new organizational culture and policy outcome. In particular, those who are skeptical of the political and partisan influence of legislatures frequently advocate budgetary autonomy to protect executive agencies from political considerations.

The drawbacks of such arrangements are predictable. Autonomous entities are not necessarily less prone to capture by powerful interests, distortion for political gain, and maladies such as bureaucratic rigidity. Indeed, some argue that entities with budgetary autonomy are more prone to these problems because they are outside normal legislative-executive relations and not subject to the same degree of oversight and control.

Examples of budgetary autonomy tend to include things such as state enterprises, pension funds, social programs, tax administrations, and local governments. Each of these entities could potentially manage its own inflows and outflows, and each could be taken off-budget, in the traditional sense. In a number of highly indebted poor countries, debt relief has freed resources that are then tied to social investment funds. These funds frequently operate off-budget, with a significant degree of autonomy, in the management of the allocation of these monies. Results vary.

Barbara Geddes, Politician’s Dilemma: Building State Capacity in Latin America (1994); Allen Schick, The Federal Budget: Politics, Policy, Process (1995).