STUDYING PUBLIC FINANCE ISSUES AT UNDERGRADUATE LEVEL

Abstract

Financial education in education institutions is one of the most important tools for educating the country's citizens. Higher education institutions play a key role in developing appropriate strategies. Universities are responsible for preparing their students for viable career development and their native countries. Educational experiences of the undergraduate studies of public finance are changing over the time and especially under the contemporary pandemic conditions. Learning benefits inspire collective progress by developing appropriate strategies for future financial teaching benefits.Undergraduate studies in different social science programs prepare students for independent national budget evaluation (acting as the public finance managers) which requires high qualifications. In order to achieve this goal, bachelor degree undergraduate programs at Lithuania's Military Academy partially provide the study of specialized subjects in the fields of public finance and budget planning. From the educational experience it is obvious that the most important subject is the national budget which requires from the students a prior knowledge in the field of public finance revenue and taxation system.Estimating that the main purpose of governmental resources management could be public finance, it is beneficial to teach students about budget operations and tax revenues. The teaching process should be based on accurately selected cases, so that it could be obvious for students. From a didactic point of view, the properly selected case is the one that contains a lot of differences between national and government budget, municipal budget and their records in the national law system.One of the teaching examples that meets the above criteria could be revenue collected from public taxes. Educational presentation of different taxes is one of the educational practice learning benefits for the understanding of the national budget. Moreover, principles of government and municipal budgets diversification should be clearly understandable in the education of undergraduate students. The paper presents the teaching advantages and disadvantages of choosing the different taxes for the national, state and municipal budget. One of the most effective educational innovations is calculating by students their personal tax burden for different social life situations. Furthermore, purposes of teaching students subjects of public budgeting and principles of taxation are discussed in the example of value added tax. Amid the many preferences the most important could be a pattern that clearly shows different approaches to budget expenditures and tax diversification as the interrelated issue, that is the amount of budget expenditures strictly correlate with taxable and non taxable income in the public finance and it depends on the budget legislation. Educational experience in teaching public finance usually is constructed from years of practice.