The Budget Process in South Vietnam

Abstract

T IS NOW ALMOST SIX YEARS since the Geneva Agreement marked the end of the Indochina War and since the designation of Ngo-Dinh-Diem as Prime Minister of South Vietnam marked the end of French control in that country. In these years the leaders of South Vietnam have subdued, if not eliminated, internal dissension, dismissed their former hereditary ruler, and adopted a Westernized Constitution with a French-style National Assembly and an American-style Presidency. After eighty years under French colonial rule, which did not include training in the intricacies of representative selfgovernment, South Vietnam has emerged from war, foreign domination, and semi-feudalism to take its place among the emergent republics of Asia. This article examines an important aspect of South Vietnam's brief experience with democratic institutions-the role of the Executive and the Legislature in the budget process. In view of the central importance of legislative purse-string control in democratic governments generally, special attention is given to the role of the National Assembly in this process. The control of appropriations, and revenues, has traditionally meant not only control over policy in the evolution of parliamentary institutions, but control over administrative agencies as well. Furthermore, the Vietnamese Constitution itself gives the budget function special prominence, singling it out for specific mention in an otherwise general discussion of the National Assembly's legislative powers.' Finally, in the few dozen laws which the Vietnamese National Assembly has thus far enacted, its most serious and timeconsuming business has been the consideration of the three budgets presented to it by the President. In i887, the French Government combined five of its territorial possessions into an artificial Indochinese Union. Three of the territories, Tonkin, Annam, and Cochinchina, were themselves artificially created from the older monarchy of Vietnam. The other two, Cambodia and Laos, had been politically separate from each other, and even more apart, culturally and politically, from Vietnam. This forced union was ruled by a French Governor-General, assisted by governors or superior residents charged with the local affairs of the five individual states. The representative assemblies which were established by the French Administration were purely consulta-