Budgetary Institutions and Expenditure Outcomes: Binding Governments to Fiscal Performance

How institutional arrangements affect incentives governing the size, allocation, and use of budgetary resources and improve transparency and accountability -- binding key players to particular fiscal outcomes and making it costly for them to misbehave. Campos and Pradhan examine how institutional arrangements affect incentives that govern the size, allocation, and use of budgetary resources. They use a diagnostic questionnaire designed to elicit the relative strengths and weaknesses of specific systems in terms of instilling fiscal discipline, strategically assigning spending priorities, and making the best use of limited resources. In applying their methodology to a sample of seven countries (Australia, Ghana, Indonesia, Malawi, New Zealand, Thailand, and Uganda), they also examine how donor assistance affects expenditure outcomes. They first compare the far-reaching reforms introduced in Australia and New Zealand, two countries at the cutting edge of institutional reform. In New Zealand, reform focused on achieving general fiscal discipline and technical efficiency (getting the best output at the least cost). In Australia, reform focused on strategic priorities and a shift from central to line agencies to identify savings within hard budget constraints. The two countries took dramatically different paths, but both sought to alter the incentives that affect the size, allocation, and use of resources, and to improve transparency and accountability, binding key players to particular fiscal outcomes and making it costly for them to misbehave. Systems in Indonesia and Thailand were reasonably effective in instilling fiscal discipline, but Indonesia seemed to be somewhat better at allocating resources to protect basic social services and alleviate poverty during periods of fiscal austerity. Thailand's overcentralized system did not capitalize on use...