In order to deal with the increasing complexity of governmentâs role, most countries have experimented with a variety of forms for the budget and its presentation. Among the more important of these are the administrative budget, the current and capital budget, program and zero-base budgeting, and the full-employment budget. The variety of budgeting methods is extended to the types of efficiency measures used to increase value for money and to the alternative methods of projecting expenditures in cash, volume, and cost terms.
The traditional administrative budget contains the executiveâs recommendations concerning the raising of what Magna Carta referred to as âscutage or aidâ and the disposal of it for purposes of government. This kind of budget is designed to control expenditure; accordingly, it emphasizes the salaries and tasks of civil servants rather than the results that they are supposed to achieve. The control objective of the administrative budget naturally gives rise to the doctrine that the budget should be balanced. Deficits imply irresponsibility. Surpluses imply the imposition of unwarranted tax burdens on the public.
The limitation of the administrative budget is that some important items receive less than adequate attention or are excluded from it entirely. Military procurement is one example. Neither budget offices nor appropriations committees are well equipped to scrutinize the actual procurement of ships or aircraft. Consequently, in most countries large expenditures on military items are often treated perfunctorily while the activities of civil servants receive inordinate amounts of attention. The basic weakness of the administrative budget is that it is principally concerned with whether expenditure has been properly authorized, rather than whether money has been well spent.
Moreover, the administrative budget often excludes trust funds used to finance contributory old-age and unemployment insurance; taxes are paid directly into the funds and disbursements made out of them. The theory is that the government acts as trustee for the public and that the public is protected by having its social security taxes put in a separate fund. Many countries have adopted this idea of âsocial insuranceâ; it formed the heart of Bismarckâs social policy for Germany in the 1870s and of the British welfare state, founded in 1948. In most cases, however, the attempt to generate a distinct fund has failed, and âcontributionsâ have become just another tax with expenditures on, for example, retirement pensions paid irrespective of the resources available to the fund.
Other items may be included in the budget on a net rather than a gross basis. For instance, the total receipts and expenditures of the post office or other commercial activities of the public sector usually do not appear; only the deficit or surplus does. This is justified by the theory that, first, business management is not well performed by legislative committees and, second, that so long as a business undertaking pays its way, its conduct is not a matter of public concern. The problem is that the distinction between commercial and noncommercial activities is often arbitrarily made.
Current and capital budget
The administrative budget traditionally deals only with current expenditures; in many countries, some items are regarded as inappropriate for inclusion because they finance capital expenditures or are loans to other public bodies. Such items are then included âbelow the line,â and the traditional concept of budget balance is not applied to them; instead, it is regarded as permissible to finance them by borrowing.
Direct public works or investment in nationalized industries are regarded by most countries as suitable for loan financing on the ground that they are productive assets that will yield a revenue sufficient to cover their cost. They may do so either directly, as in the case of a toll highway, or indirectly by increasing the general economic welfare, as in the case of a free highway. If, however, there is no market in which the output of a public activity is sold, there can be no objective test of its value. Hence, governments are often tempted to classify expenditure on such assets as capital items that yield a social but no economic return (e.g., free playgrounds) or a lower economic return than any private sector institution would accept (as in government support for declining industries). For this reason, distinctions between current and capital expenditures in public accounts are often viewed with suspicion.
This suspicion may be increased where, as is often the case, the rules for what is regarded as current or capital are rather indistinct. Moreover, governments have been reluctant to adopt the systematic distinction between current and capital items, or between cash flows and profit and loss accounts, or to construct a balance sheet, even though these mechanisms of monitoring receipts and expenditures are universal in private sector accounting. The federal government of the United States, for example, has resisted the idea of a capital budget, even though there was strong pressure for one in the 1930s when economists and politicians wanted to legitimize the government deficit. Among U.S. state and municipal governments, however, loan financing of public works is the regular practice for two reasons. First, those bodies are usually unable to finance their projects by current taxation; second, they do not want to finance them because the projects are generally of a long-term nature.
Most national governments have become accustomed to thinking in terms of national economic policies in which the amount of borrowing to be undertaken depends on current requirements for stability and growth. This makes capital budgeting less attractive, particularly if the government wishes to use the budget to supplement the national flow of savings. The more need there is to increase saving, the smaller should be the amount of government borrowing. On the other hand, government borrowing is justified when private savings tend to exceed private capital requirements.
This lack of explicit monitoring for the capital position of governments can have serious consequences when the government unwittingly takes on large liabilities or uses capital assets to finance current expenditures. Examples are provided by the growing problems in some countries in financing generous state pension schemes and the wasting of assets such as oil reserves.
